Jumping to Generous Conclusions

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today, we're going to talk about jumping to generous conclusions. So as we go about daily life, many of us are really quick to jump to negative conclusions rather than, what I like to call, generous ones. So our conclusions are basically, you know, our interpretations of other people, how they behave as well as our conclusions about ourselves, events and situations. So you might want to consider a scenario where you leave a message on a friend's voicemail asking for some advice that you need on an urgent issue.

And you know that they have some expertise in this area. So you wait. You call again. Hours, go by and then days, no reply. So you end up having to figure out the issue on your own without their help.

What goes through your head at this point? What assumptions might you make? For many of us in a situation like this, the mind tends to automatically jump to some kind of negative conclusion. So perhaps thinking something like, oh, obviously this person doesn't really value me, or maybe they don't like me that much, or we might conclude that this person is actually lazy, rude or selfish. Maybe you conclude that you're seeing actually now this person's "true colors" right when you needed them. Right? So this is the kind of thing that we tend to assume, tend to jump to these kinds of conclusions. When we take our friend's lack of response personally, or assume they don't care, whether they're just kind of such and such kind of a person, it's really important for us to recognize that we are assuming.

We are interpreting the situation. And in this case with a quite a negative spin on it. But the thing is we could easily do it the other way around too. We could easily put a positive spin on it, on all of our interpretations and assumptions. Right? So what would happen if we learned, therefore, to jump to more generous conclusions, instead of automatically assuming the worst? So we might consider in this situation that actually our friend is really a kind and decent person who has their own problems and their own demands to deal with in their lives.

You might consider how many times they've shown up for us being kind and showed that they care. We might even take a moment to step outside of what we want from them in that moment and consider, gosh, they must be really busy at the moment. I wonder if I could do anything to help out. So my invitation for today and for the week ahead is to just really keep an eye on recognizing the conclusions that you jumped to and try jumping to more generous conclusions, and then see how that affects your life. So for instance, the next time someone lets you down in some way - they're late, someone cuts in, in traffic, rubs you up the wrong way - just asking yourself, what's the most generous conclusion I could make about this person's intentions or behaviors? I wish you well with this practice and as always, thank you for your practice.

Let's settle in for today's meditation.