11: Empathy & Understanding Others#

Next Time Someone Seems Unreasonable, Assume You’re Missing One Crucial Piece of Information#

1. Try Saying “I Might Be Wrong” Before You Argue

Five words. They cost nothing and change everything. When you open a disagreement by admitting your understanding might be incomplete, two things happen at once: you lower the other person’s defenses, and you open your own mind. Most arguments aren’t about who’s right—they’re about who’s willing to be wrong first. That willingness isn’t weakness. It’s the highest form of intellectual honesty. The person who says “I might be wrong” isn’t giving up their position. They’re making room for a better one to show up. And in that room, actual solutions live.

2. Don’t Assume Malice When Ignorance Explains It

The colleague who didn’t reply to your email probably isn’t ignoring you. They’re drowning in their own inbox. The manager who made a call without consulting you probably isn’t undermining you. They were under time pressure you didn’t see. The vast majority of workplace friction comes from information gaps, not bad intentions. When you default to assuming the worst about people’s motives, you poison every interaction before it starts. The generous interpretation is almost always the accurate one. And even when it’s not, starting there costs you nothing, while starting with suspicion costs you everything.

3. Empathy Is Not Agreement—It Is Acknowledgment

You can understand someone completely and still disagree with them entirely. Those two things aren’t in conflict. Empathy doesn’t ask you to give up your position. It asks you to temporarily step into another person’s experience—to see the landscape from where they’re standing, with the information they have, under the pressures they face. This isn’t soft. It’s demanding. It requires holding two contradictory views in your head at the same time and resisting the urge to flatten them into one. The person who can do this isn’t indecisive. They’re seeing more of the picture than anyone else in the room.

4. Try Asking “What Am I Missing?” Before Every Disagreement

This one question has prevented more pointless conflicts than any mediation framework ever built. It works because it redirects your energy from defending your position to expanding your understanding. When you ask what you might be missing, you invite the other person to teach you instead of fight you. The dynamic flips from adversarial to collaborative in a single sentence. You’re not conceding—you’re investigating. And investigation, unlike argument, actually goes somewhere useful. Make this your default response to friction. Not “why are you wrong” but “what don’t I see yet.” The answers will surprise you more often than not.

5. Don’t Project Your Logic onto Other People’s Decisions

Your reasoning isn’t universal. The way you rank priorities, assess risk, and define success is shaped by your specific experiences, fears, and values—none of which are shared identically by anyone else. When someone makes a decision that looks irrational to you, the most likely explanation is that they’re optimizing for a variable you’re not tracking. They’re not being illogical. They’re being logical inside a framework you haven’t understood yet. Before you judge, map their framework. You’ll almost always find coherence where you first saw chaos.

6. Try Sitting with Discomfort Instead of Rushing to Fix

When someone shares a struggle, the instinct is to solve it. Offer advice. Suggest a plan. Make the feeling go away. Resist that instinct. Most of the time, people don’t come to you for solutions—they come to be heard. Listening without jumping in is profoundly generous and profoundly rare. It says something no advice can: I trust you to handle this, and I’m here while you do. Presence without prescription is one of the most underrated skills in professional life. Learn it. Practice it. It will change how people experience you.