The story we tell ourselves (and why it’s often wrong)
SmartBrief | 13.03.2026 23:10
Picture the following. A manager vents about one of her employees. “He’s just lazy,” she says. “He missed another deadline.” A few days later, she discovers what she hadn’t seen before. His father had been hospitalized. He had been shuttling between doctors’ appointments, childcare and late nights trying to keep up with his workload. The missed deadline was not about laziness at all. It was about exhaustion and fear. Nothing about the facts had changed. Only the story had.
