The stories we make up when we don't have the facts

You flag a risk to your boss and hear nothing for two days. By the second morning you have a full idea of what happened. She thinks you are being dramatic, she is losing confidence in you and does not respect your opinion anymore. Maybe this is how getting managed out starts. Then she replies, apologetic, buried in a deadline, grateful you caught it. The whole story was fiction. You worked inside it for two days anyway, second-guessing everything you sent her.

That is just what the mind does with a gap. It manufactures an explanation and hands it to you with the confidence of a fact. The neurologist Robert Burton spent a whole book on the point: the feeling of knowing is a sensation the brain produces on its own, not a verdict earned by evidence [1]. Everyone fills gaps this way, and at work it is dangerous because the story almost always casts you as the victim or the failure.

Why a bad story beats no story

Uncertainty is the part we cannot sit with. In one study, people facing a coin-flip chance of an electric shock were more stressed than people who knew for certain the shock was coming [2]. A finished story, even an ugly one, ends that suspense, which is why we grab the first one available and hold on.

Brené Brown’s name for that first story is blunt: the sh*tty first draft, a term she borrowed from the writer Anne Lamott [3]. You cannot suppress it, it shows up on its own. What you can do is notice you are holding one, because the moment you call it a draft, you stop treating it like reality.

Putting it into practice

This is for the gaps that are really about another person, the moments where you have no idea what someone meant and your mind hands you an answer anyway. A silence, a short reply, a meeting you were not invited to, and a story already forming about what it means. The first story is going to arrive whether you invite it or not. Watch the shape of that story. When it casts you as the victim or the failure, that is your signal you are holding a draft, not the truth.

So name it to them. When you’re talking to the person involved, you just say it: “the story I’m making up is that the silence means you are unhappy with me.” It labels your interpretation as a guess instead of an accusation, and it hands the other person the easiest possible opening to correct you. If that phrasing feels too soft for your team, try the plain version: “here is what I’m assuming, correct me if I am wrong.” And sometimes the draft turns out to be right. Ask anyway. Then you’re working with something real instead of a suspicion you just keep turning over.

Sources

Robert Burton, On Being Certain — macmillan.com
de Berker et al., uncertainty and acute stress — nature.com
Brené Brown, the story rumble and the “shitty first draft” — brenebrown.com