Why You Should Assume Good Intent | Mel Robbins

I have a challenge for you it's a very simple task this simple thing I'm going to ask you to do it's extraordinarily hard and here's what it is today for the next 24 hours I want you to assume that everybody else around you has the best intentions the person that cuts you off in traffic the friend that's not texting you back the customer that writes an email that has a snarky tone whatever it may be the fact that you may be riled that you posted something on Facebook and and one of your best friends didn't tag you in it or didn't like it I mean we get hung up around the stupidest stuff but today I want you to assume the best intentions you know this recently happened to me where I really had to put this to use I had a situation at work where I had a conference call and it was related to a speech and it was one of these kind of kickoff calls or a bunch of people on the client-side are gonna be there and we're gonna talk about the event and I'm gonna talk about the speech and during the conversation this conference called I said something that I didn't mean to say I was totally responsible I basically said what day am i speaking now I knew the date that I was speaking what I didn't know is in the flow of the event was I the opener was I the closer was I the person that's supposed to be the defibrillator after a big lunch like what role am i playing that's a really important thing to understand if you're giving a speech because it helps you customize what you're gonna do well the client misunderstood me because I wasn't precise and they were annoyed because they thought holy cow we've we've hired this person we've sent her all kinds of information she doesn't even know what day she's speaking so the client gets upset they complain to the event planner the event planner then writes me one of these emails it's like this long the planner was really upset because I had made the planner look bad in front of the client now fully my responsibility completely unintentional and also based on a gigantic misunderstanding so what did I do well I did exactly what you should do when you screw up I took total responsibility I apologized I went overboard and cleaned the mess up I wrote a long email I actually left voicemail messages when we had to deliver a bunch of things I went overboard and being great about it and you know what I got from the plane that was really upset with me I didn't get an email back I didn't get a phone call back even though I had a requested one nothing nothing nothing nothing and of course what happens when somebody doesn't respond to you whether it's somebody that you're dating or it's somebody that's a good friend or it's a customer or somebody that's upset with you and you've apologized you immediately think that you've done something wrong we even do it if you get an email and somebody's tone is slightly off it is bananas how quickly we assume mal-intent we assume we're in trouble we assume we've done something wrong so what did I do in this situation because my reaction was I was disappointed that I didn't actually get a nice email back or a hey no problem let's move on and have a great event just got silenced what did I do I use the five-second rule five four three two one when I catch myself thinking about it and then I assume positive intent I tell myself a different story I say oh well I've apologized twice so maybe the planner feels that everything is complete and taken care of and no need to discuss it further I also assume hey this event is a big event I'm sure they're SuperDuper busy and that's the last concern on their list another thing that you can say is maybe they're busy maybe this isn't a big deal to them maybe I've already been forgiven the point is this you can torture yourself and I mean torture yourself over the fact that people haven't texted you back you can torture yourself over the tone of emails that you receive you can get so angry at the person that cuts you off in traffic if you can master the ability to catch yourself when you go down the road of saying you've done something wrong or some other person's a complete and you five four three two one and you assume good intent maybe that person cut me off because they're stressed about work and they're afraid they're gonna get fired if they don't get there on time maybe that's what happened they didn't maybe they didn't see me and by the way I hear a lot of people talk about this with dating I do have a three-strike rule from baseball if you reach out to somebody with good intent three different times and you hear crickets it's over let it go and move on you've done nothing wrong but if you continue to pester the person past three unresponded reach outs now you're stepping into the zone of being annoying so stop it

Channel: Mel Robbins

Views: 120,778

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Id: C_71NOHV8oE

Length: 4min 49sec (289 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 26 2018