Out of Context
I once told my mom her outfit was “an unusual color of pink.”
That’s it. Five words. No edge to them, no hidden dig. I was just remarking on a really different color. But she stormed off like I’d insulted her to her core.
For years, I filed that moment away as a lesson about my own mouth: think before you speak, because words can be misread. And that’s true enough. But it took me a long time to realize the lesson wasn’t really about me at all.
My mom didn’t hear “unusual color of pink.” She heard something else entirely. Something shaped by every comment ever made about her appearance, every unspoken rule in her own interpretation about what was acceptable and what wasn’t, every old wound I couldn’t see and didn’t know existed. Five neutral words landed on top of a lifetime of context I wasn’t carrying and she wasn’t naming. She wasn’t reacting to me. She was reacting to a story already running in her head, and I just happened to say the sentence that triggered it.
That’s the moment I actually want to talk about. Not the outfit, not the color, not even the storming off. It’s this: we almost never react to what’s actually in front of us. We react to what it means to us, based on where we came from, who we’ve spent our lives around, and the beliefs we’ve quietly built for ourselves without ever putting them on trial.
And I think that’s an issue the whole world’s feeling right now. Everyone talking past each other. Everyone certain they’ve read a person, a comment, a situation correctly, when in reality, they’ve just run it through a filter built by their upbringing, their sphere of influence, or a private, half-examined belief they’ve never once questioned.
I see this same thing play out constantly in my work, just with higher stakes and better suits.
A few years back, I was working with a seller who came across as cold. Short answers. No small talk. Wouldn’t budge an inch on price, wouldn’t entertain a single request from the buyer’s side… not a repair, not a closing cost credit, nothing. My read on him, fast and confident: this guy’s greedy, and he doesn’t actually want to sell.
I built my whole strategy around that assumption. I braced for a fight. I coached the buyer to expect a wall.
Turned out the seller was selling his late wife’s house. Every question about “the roof” or “the water heater” wasn’t a negotiation to him. It was somebody putting a price tag on the last twenty years of his life and asking him to shave off a few thousand dollars for the privilege. He wasn’t cold. He was underwater in grief and using short, flat sentences to keep himself from drowning in front of strangers.
I’d taken five interactions and built an entire character out of them- motive, morality, the works- with none of the actual context. And I was completely wrong.
That’s the part that unsettles me now, looking back. It’s not that I misjudged him. It’s how sure I was while I was doing it. I didn’t feel like I was guessing. I felt like I was reading him accurately. That’s what makes this so dangerous; the assumptions rarely announce themselves as assumptions. They just feel like the truth.
So where does this actually come from? I think it’s three layers, stacked on top of each other so smoothly we never notice the seams.
The first layer is upbringing; the rules we absorbed before we were old enough to question them. What silence meant in your house. What a raised eyebrow meant. What “unusual” meant. Nobody sat us down and taught us these things directly; we just learned them by living inside them, the way you learn a language without ever being taught the grammar.
The second layer is our sphere of influence: the people we’ve surrounded ourselves with as adults, whose reactions and opinions we’ve quietly let calibrate our own. If everyone in your circle assumes the worst about a certain kind of person, a certain kind of comment, a certain kind of silence, you’ll start assuming it too, without ever deciding to.
But the third layer is the sneakiest one, because it feels the most like “just me”: the beliefs we’ve built entirely from our own inner thoughts. No one taught us these. No one around us modeled them. We just decided, somewhere along the way, that a certain kind of quiet means someone’s angry, or a certain kind of success means someone’s arrogant, or a certain kind of question means someone doesn’t trust us… and we never once went back to check if that belief was actually true. We just kept building on top of it.
All three layers do the same thing: they hand us a finished conclusion and skip the part where we actually look at what’s in front of us. And because the conclusion arrives dressed as instinct, as a “read” on a person or a situation, we rarely stop to ask where it came from. We just act on it. I built a negotiation strategy on it. My mom stormed out of a room over it.
So, here’s what I keep coming back to, and it’s genuinely the only antidote I’ve found: before you react, ask what you’re reacting to. Not “what did they say,” but “what did I hear, and where did that meaning come from?” Is this actually about the person in front of me, or is it about the last ten people who reminded me of them? Is this actually what was said, or what I was primed to expect someone to say? Ask more questions, and for more clarification. Don’t assume, as my wise old broker once taught me, we gave up our assumptions with our real estate license. Because when you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME. And in this business, that gets expensive fast.
It won’t make you immune to misjudging people. I still do it. But it buys you a half-second of doubt before the assumption calcifies into a conclusion you’ll act on, and that half-second is usually enough to ask one more question instead of storming out of the room, or bracing for a fight that was never actually being offered.
I never did get to fully explain myself to my mom that day, she’d already decided what I meant, and by the time she stormed off, the conversation was over before it started. I’ve had versions of that same non-conversation with clients, with the seller and his late wife’s roof, with people who read my own silence or my own bluntness and built a story about me that had nothing to do with what I actually meant.
I don’t think we can turn this off completely. We’re pattern-matching creatures; that’s how we survive, how we move fast, how we protect ourselves from things that hurt us before. But maybe the goal isn’t to stop making assumptions. Maybe it’s just to hold them a little more loosely. To remember that the story running in our head about someone’s tone, their silence, their color choice in an outfit, is our story first, built from our upbringing, our circle, our own untested beliefs, before it’s ever actually about them.
Because “unusual” was never about the clothes. And “cold” was never really about the seller. And I’d bet the thing that set you off this week wasn’t really about what someone said either.
It was about what you heard.
If we could just begin thinking more before we react, the world might move toward healing. Even if just a little, it would allow us more grace. More time to process or distinguish between accurate read, or an inaccurate one. It could maybe curb you from raging off with the wrong hurt feelings. It might actually allow us to discuss things with less judgement, and find better solutions that serve us all better. I am always hopeful about finding better ways, so I hope this gives you the same promise. Don’t read into everything. Everyone doesn’t mean to jab you. Give someone the benefit of the doubt sometimes, and you may be surprised at the substantially different outcome.