Assume Good Intent

What tedious Tuesday meetings and Eleanor Roosevelt taught me about how we choose to see others

I worked for many years as an executive at a children’s hospital system. I had a group of close colleagues whose friendship I still treasure, and we would gather for a drink now and then. I’d like to say we were above gossiping about people at work. We weren’t. Whenever a fellow executive moved on to greener pastures – either by choice or by GNP (Gone, No Party), we’d discuss the departure. Countless times, I would be shocked to hear how my colleagues felt about that person.

One time in particular, I remember saying, “I’m sorry to see him go. I always enjoyed working with him.” Only looks of incredulity met my words. Then outbursts. “He was such an asshole!” “So full of himself.” “I couldn’t stand working with him.” “He talked down to everyone.” They interacted with a completely different person.

It’s possible this guy transformed into his good twin only around me, but the frequency of contradicting reports tells me otherwise. He was one of numerous people others disliked working with but whom I found delightful and collaborative. I tend to perceive that most people around me are striving to be helpful, kind, and generally doing their best. Perhaps I experience that kind of person more often simply because I choose to.

As a fancy-schmancy senior vice president, I also had to sit through unnecessarily early Tuesday morning meetings. Even now, I groan reliving the hours of the same political and verbal jockeying between hospital executives, like Groundhog Day every week. But despite the tedium, these meetings did birth a set of guiding principles for our interactions with one other that have served me well over the years.

My favorite continues to be: “Assume good intent.” I believe that practicing this principle fosters an environment of kindness and respect, better enabling me and my colleagues to keep our focus on the work in front of us and to find more joy in accomplishing it together. As an executive leader, I did my best to model this principle and encouraged my teams to do the same. Start every encounter, every meeting with this thought in mind. Give each other the benefit of the doubt and respond accordingly.

Many of my former team members tell me they continue to follow this adage and coach their own teams to do the same. With a little more life under my belt, this principle has broadened and deepened in meaning for me. It’s about striving to see others as God intends us to be and recognizing that, in our own way, we are all trying to get back to that state.

Ultimately, it’s about what we choose to see, regardless of someone else’s intent. I’m reminded of my favorite Eleanor Roosevelt quote: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” How do I consent to receive another’s words, their tone, their actions? Am I looking for reasons to be offended or to connect?

I worked with a woman who flat out rubbed me the wrong way most of the time. I couldn’t see all the ways in which we were actually the same because I was too busy assuming negative intent and casting her as her evil twin in our little telenovela. That’s the lens through which I interpreted everything she did or said. And guess who showed up for me as a result? My own evil twin, the me ruled by defensiveness, frustration, and annoyance – sometimes by pure self-righteous superiority. I lost my ability to communicate effectively with her, to think logically and lovingly, to bring forward creative solutions. I let myself become a poorer, less skillful version of me – not just in her presence but anytime I thought negatively like that about her.

As a mother, I see it happen too with my boys. They do or say something completely logical for their ages and usually pretty irrelevant in the scheme of life, but I get in my head, envisioning overly dramatic eventualities and jumping all over them as a result. Of course, they love to call me out on this. “Mom, you always tell us to believe the best of others. Why can’t you believe the best of me?” They’re right. Why am I rushing to cast them as their evil twins? Regardless of their intent, I can choose to see them first and foremost as the kind, generous, loving boys they inherently are. That lens immediately changes the tenor and tone of my interactions with them.

Whether with my boys or my colleagues or even total strangers, focusing my awareness on the moment and what is actually most important frees me up to look for the best in others, no matter who they are, what they do or say, or what I want to assume they’re thinking. It shifts me to the side that supports and connects, rather than the side that tears down and separates.

But what if someone really does have negative intent? Ultimately, that’s their business, not mine. I don’t have to consent to it. I may find it harder to assume good intent in the moment, but it’s still worth pursuing.

I believe we have a choice in what world we choose to live, that we make our reality. This is my constant work, to choose the world where the more we believe the best of others, the more they give their best – where the more loving intent I bring to my own actions, the more others naturally reciprocate. Maybe not always in that moment or even to me, but somewhere to someone, they will.

I finished a novel a while back where one of the characters reminds another that any amount of light dispels darkness. Any amount. That’s how light works, she explains. Being of God, we all have divine light within us. When we choose to share any amount of that light, we free up others to do the same. It starts by assuming they will and giving them space to find and shine their own light.

That world of light is the one I want to experience all the time. So I do my best to build it by assuming good intent and giving others space to do the same – even in the middle of tedious Tuesday meetings.

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