92. Assuming What Others Think is a Trap; The Story in Your Head May Be Wrong

The Mind-Reading Trap

Cheryl Fischer 0:00

Have you ever been in a situation where you are absolutely convinced, 100% convinced, that you know what someone else is thinking about you? I think the answer to that for all of us is yes. We'll even say, well, they think I blah, blah, blah, and then we'll take action accordingly. But the question is, are you actually correct? Do they really think that? Let's talk about it. Welcome to Mind Your Midlife, your go-to resource for confidence and success, one thought at a time. Unlike most advice out there, we believe that simply telling you to believe in yourself or change your habits isn't enough to wake up excited about life or feel truly confident in your body. Each week, you'll gain actionable strategies and, oh my goodness, powerful insights to stop feeling stuck and start loving your midlife. This is the Mind Your Midlife podcast.

Invitation To The Inner Circle

Cheryl Fischer 1:07

Before we really get into it today, I want to share something with you that I am so excited about. So last summer, I did a little trial of launching a Substack and a Patreon membership. And I burned myself out within a couple months. And how did I do that? Well, I was trying to do just so much content, uh, an extra piece of this, a chat about that, an extra piece of this, something else, and a secret episode, so many things. I burned out and I stopped. So after I've had time to think through that and figure out what it is I really was aiming for, what I want to do is have a community where we can interact more, where we can know each other, where you can ask questions, and I'm can give you my unfiltered thoughts, and vice versa. So I'm gonna launch it in a way that I really want to do it, and I hope you'll join me. So I want to invite you to the brand new Mind Your Midlife Inner Circle on Substack. This is meant to be a cozy space for us to be able to connect. So when and if you subscribe, you are supporting the show. Number one, allowing me to keep going and doing this podcast that I love to do. Number two, you will get ad-free episodes. Every new episode, ad-free in video form as well, and weekly unfiltered thoughts from me in some extra little audios and a private chat where we can all lean on each other. During the month of July 2026, as we launch, you can get 20% off the annual membership fee. I would love to see you there as a founding member. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for supporting my work and this podcast that I love. I can't wait to see you there. The link is in the show notes. It's mindyourmidlife.substack.com slash launchparty. Very excited. Can't wait to see you.

A Real-Life Relationship Assumption

Cheryl Fischer 3:43

All right, now let me get back on track because I gave you a little teaser at the beginning that we get so convinced that we know what other people are thinking, right? Let me give you some examples. So I have, you've heard me allude to this, I have some struggles going on with some very important people in my life right now. And I have to be somewhat vague because we're gonna keep the details of that off the table. And I have been for a while now fairly sure that they think that I was not being kind, or maybe I was not being authentic, I was being judgmental, some combination of that. Maybe I don't like them. And I was really struggling with that because I have been believing that that's what they believe. And so I'm creating a struggle for myself where I'm trying to swallow that. I'm doing my tapping, I'm I'm trying to feel through it, and it's hard. And so I have to ask myself, what if that's not true? What if that's not actually the problem? What if it's some other issue that I can't really understand because I'm not aware of it? If that is the problem, it's gonna be hard. I'm gonna try to figure a way through it. And we don't know. They never said any of those things. I don't know. So I was pondering this and it just it just got me thinking, we get ourselves into this trap all the time. How many other times have I done this? How many other times have you done this? We're convinced we know exactly what someone is thinking, and maybe you've even seen the evidence that many times it turns out that we were wrong. I went and looked in some articles related to therapy, related to counseling, related to how the brain works, and I found some research.

Mind Reading As A Cognitive Distortion

Cheryl Fischer 6:10

And this was actually done by psychiatrists way back in the 1960s and then repeated a few times since. And they call this trap that I'm talking about, where we believe we know what people are thinking, a mind-reading cognitive distortion. This concept was that we somehow believe, and using the words cognitive distortion means it's not accurate, we somehow believe that we know what someone else is thinking. And part of the problem is oftentimes we assume it's negative. Then we march ourselves off and we act on those assumptions as if they were facts, never even figuring out whether it was true, never even trying to find any evidence whether it was true or whether it wasn't. We do it a lot. So let me give you another example besides the one I just described.

Midlife Examples At Home And Work

Cheryl Fischer 7:09

We're in midlife. If you have a spouse or a partner, are you starting to kind of worry because you think they don't think you're attractive anymore? Maybe you're not thrilled with some of the way your body is changing. And so you are getting concerned. It could be just a little bit of concern, could be very stressed, could be very worked up about this, that they must not be attracted to you anymore. Is that true, though? I mean, it could be, but it also very well could be that they're absolutely still attracted to you because it's you. It's not about exactly what your leg looks like. It's you. Or maybe you are working in a job where you have a boss and you are telling yourself, as all of this AI comes, AI, AI, AI. That's all we hear about. AI, AI, AI. I feel like I'm singing the old McDonald's song. That's all we hear about. Are you telling yourself that your boss thinks you're too old to learn it or be involved in whatever new project is going on related to AI? Because maybe you're worried that it's gonna be hard for you to learn, but you don't know what your boss thinks unless your boss has actually told you. You don't know. You could be completely wrong. Your boss could be thinking, thank goodness I have someone with so much work experience that can work on this project where we go into this new technology. You could be completely wrong about what that boss thinks. And interestingly, a lot of times we start projecting. And I am convinced I see this in politics a lot, although we're not talking about politics really on this podcast episode, but maybe you'll recognize what I mean. Projection happens a lot where we have our own uncomfortable feelings, like we're not happy with our body, or we feel we may have done something that made someone else uncomfortable, or we feel worried about being involved in this new AI project because we feel worried that we can do it. And so we project that and make that be what someone else must think, it's kind of a defense mechanism, and this is classic Freud as well as others, classic. So if you are thinking that your friends and family think that your career pivot is a joke, how could you be doing this? It could very well be that you are questioning it. And so you're projecting those thoughts onto them. We assume other people are judging us for the exact things we're currently judging ourselves for. And it may be that, it may not be that, but that is a classic defense mechanism that we all sometimes use. So as I was thinking this through, you know, I just don't want to leave you frustrated that other people have all these thoughts that you've just made up. And uh, oh well, tough luck. We're gonna figure out some ideas on what we can

Projection And Self-Judgment

Cheryl Fischer 10:52

do. And this made me think about the book that I really love and refer to a lot. If you're watching the video, you can see it. So, Tara Mohr, I think is how you say her name, wrote a book called Playing Big. And this is something that coaches use a lot. But the the second part of the title is practical wisdom for women who want to speak up, create, and lead. I will put this on cherylpfischer.com/ read so that you can grab it if you want it, because isn't that what we're talking about here? Come on now. And she has a chapter in here called Unhooking from Praise and Criticism. So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go a step farther and we're gonna ask ourselves, okay, if we recognize that we don't know for sure what that other person is thinking, because how would we know? Then how do we proceed? What should we do? We're gonna figure it out. By the way, I just had to pause and change my glasses. I know that many of you will understand because I need the glasses that have the reading part in them. Midlife, that's midlife for you. Okay. So she says in this chapter, in fact, most of the fears that women have around playing bigger are about what other people will think. Examples, people won't like what I have

Playing Big On Praise And Criticism

Cheryl Fischer 12:26

to say. My colleagues will think I don't know what I'm talking about. My family will not approve. Isn't this what we've just been saying? We think that they think that we can't do it or we shouldn't do it, or we won't do it well. And that fear keeps us from taking the challenge, from playing big, from trying something new. And there are, according to her, six reasons that we care so much about what other people think. And I was pretty fascinated because I mean, we know we care what other people think. And some of us think we care less, and some of us think we care more, but we do care, of course. I'll read them to you, but then we're gonna focus on a couple of them. So now that I've said six, let me tell you the six. Good girl conditioning, relational focus, heightened awareness of others' reactions, history of survival through likability, social influence, fear of personal attacks, and cultural focus on girls and women's appearance. That's an interesting one. What I want to focus on is just a couple of

Why We Care What People Think

Cheryl Fischer 13:41

these. And the first one is what she calls relational focus. I would call this that we are conditioned to want community, to want a support group, to want to have relationships with people. And of course, those relationships look like all sorts of things. But the examples we've been talking about today are family, but they're also work colleagues and boss and friends and all sorts of relationships, right? And so she says, maybe it's nature, maybe it's nurture. Let's be honest, it's both. Many women become or are very relationship-oriented, right? We care for other people, we nurture other people, we take other people's perspectives into account, we do what we can to make sure there's harmony, there's connection in our families, there's connection in our communities and in our teams at work. We want to be kind and we want to know that others experience us as kind. There is nothing wrong with that. And she says that. This is the positive side of a relational focus. And it's really important. A world without women who are focusing on these relationships, I don't know. I don't want to know that world. I don't think you want to either. However, there's kind of a shadow side to that positive benefit. And that shadow side is when we turn away from what our gut, our intuition is telling us, or what we believe to be true, like our own personal truths. If we turn away from that because of fears that we won't belong, that we'll be sort of kicked out, if I may, air quote, of the group or the team, or the good relationship. When we turn away from what we really believe because we're afraid to be uncomfortable in that relationship or to be kicked out of that relationship, that is when this focus becomes a problem. That's fair. I think we can recognize ourselves in that. Another one she talks about is heightened awareness of others' reactions. And

Relational Focus And Its Shadow Side

Cheryl Fischer 15:48

this one was interesting for me. If you are a person who reads cues from other people, be careful that you use that power for good. Because if you can really see other people's body language, their facial expressions, you are going to be a person who says, Well, I know what they're thinking, just like we've been talking about. You think that you know what they think. Maybe you do. When this becomes a problem, is that it can get overwhelming. There can be all these subtle cues that maybe don't really mean anything. Maybe we're taking them to mean more than they do. She said, if a person with very high emotional intelligence, so good at reading these cues, is giving a pitch to investors. Maybe this person is picking up on 10 people's moods in the room within the first few minutes. That information could be an advantage. She could shift her pitch if she senses people losing interest, something like that. She can win them over in a smart way. However, it's often more of a liability because it might make her anxious. She might worry, she might tone herself down because she sees cues from other people that maybe have nothing to do with her, and they're from the situation they were in before, and they need to do a reset, and they're in the process of doing that. So that's another place that this comes from where we think we know what they think, and we are making ourselves

Over-Reading Cues And Shrinking Yourself

Cheryl Fischer 17:27

smaller because of it. And then the last one, I'm gonna group a bunch of hers together. It's this good girl thing. So she says, focus on our appearance, fear of personal attacks, good girl conditioning. I mean, we often get taught, maybe on purpose, maybe not on purpose, to be nice, to not rock the boat, to blend in. I got a major blend-in message when I was growing up. And I don't know that anyone gave me that message on purpose. I don't actually think so. I am someone who, when I'm excited, I get kind of big and I move around and I get loud. And I don't think I'm an overwhelming person, and yet I sometimes think other people think I am, and so I make myself smaller, if that makes sense. So it's all in there, and so what do we do about it? I can tell you that you don't know what other people are thinking. No matter what you think they're thinking, you don't know for sure. So one of the pieces of advice that I found, and this comes from cognitive behavior therapy, is to get into the habit of asking yourself, what is the evidence that this person is thinking this? And is there, this is I love this question, is there another more boring explanation for their behavior? So let me say that again. What

Good Girl Conditioning And Blending In

Cheryl Fischer 19:11

is the evidence that I know that my boss is thinking XYZ about me? That I know that my friend is thinking XYZ about me? What is the evidence? What is the concrete evidence that I know that that is a sure thing that is happening? Did they tell me? Did they tell someone else? Or am I just creating this as a story in my head? And so is there some other more simple, more blah, more boring, more everyday explanation for their behavior? Because the most simple explanation is usually right. They might have just been stuck in traffic and frustrated, they might have just gotten off a phone call that was difficult, they might have a mood because they're thinking about something completely unrelated. That happens all the time. If somebody doesn't text back, maybe they just got busy and they forgot. It doesn't necessarily mean something about you or something about me. We just don't know that. And to pull from playing big again, how do we kind of get off the hook of this? I need to stay away from criticism and I need to get praise. How do we unhook ourselves from that? But well, one of her tips that is also really powerful is feedback, negative feedback from someone, let's say, or positive, actually, doesn't tell me about me. It tells me about the people giving the feedback. Feedback doesn't tell you about you,

CBT Tools And The Boring Explanation

Cheryl Fischer 20:50

it tells you about the person giving the feedback. It tells you about the person and what they believe and what they want and what they like. And if that's not what you did, it doesn't mean what you did is wrong. Take a learning lesson from it about that feedback, but don't let it be a judgment about you yourself as a person. And there's another interesting question that you could possibly ask too when you're getting kind of worked up about what they think, what they think. Are you really wanting positive feedback? Are you really wanting praise and you're upset that you don't think you're gonna get it because of what you think they think? And why are you really wanting praise in that situation? What's going on underneath that that you're feeling like you really want that external validation? Because sometimes it's possible that we find that we have a conflict going on inside ourselves about this situation, and we may want to start doing something differently or make some different decision, and it's completely separate from anything going on outside of us, but we were kind of begging for that praise a little bit because we wanted somebody else to tell us it was okay. If we can trust our gut and trust the evidence that we have and trust the simplest explanation, it's gonna help. We don't know what they really think unless they tell us. What's the one thing I want you to hold on to? It's exactly that. I want you to trust yourself and take the constructive pieces of criticism

Unhooking From Feedback And Validation

Cheryl Fischer 22:38

with you. And just remember that you don't know what you don't know, and it's okay. Now make sure you've hit the follow button because next week we have a guest joining me, and we are going to talk about how to notice when you really need a change in your life. So that's kind of a nice continuation of the beginning of this discussion. And let me just say, if you're looking for a cozy space to connect with me and with other amazing midlife women, and you want to support this podcast, come join us in the inner circle at mindyourmidlife.substack.com. You will get ad-free every new episode. You will get unfiltered tips and tricks regularly from me and access to our private chat. Come hang with us. And until next time, keep remembering midlife is your time to take just a little bit better care of yourself on the outside and on the inside. Just a little bit more care makes a big difference.