How Unchecked Assumptions Are Impacting Your Decision Making as a NGO Leader

In this episode, we unpack the power of distinguishing facts from assumptions—a skill that’s not always intuitive but essential for reducing stress and making sound decisions. If you're struggling to lead with clarity, this conversation is for you.

In this episode you'll discover:

• How to identify common mistakes that distort your perception of reality.
• Practical techniques to turn vague assumptions into concrete facts.
• How clarifying your thoughts can reduce stress and enhance leadership outcomes.

Tune in now to gain powerful insights that will help you lead with confidence and clarity—so you can make high quality decisions!

REGISTER FOR FREE WEBINAR:  "How to Feel Better During Hard Times as a NGO Leader" 

This one hour webinar will give you practical tools to understand the source of your uncomfortable feelings, solutions to address those feelings so you feel better immediately.  Come to the live call to discuss your particular situation and what you can do to step away from stress and into action.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to The Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader podcast, the podcast, helping humanitarian and development supervisors make a greater impact by taking control of your time, leading more inclusively and empowering your team all the while avoiding stress, burnout, and overwhelm. I'm your host, leadership coach and former aid worker, Torrey Peace.

Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hello, my aspiring modern NGO leader. I hope you're having a great week. These days, it's becoming all the more important, more and more to separate facts from fiction. There are a variety of reasons why it's important to know the truth, behind what is happening in reality versus [00:01:00] all the different layers that we add with our own perspective, our own thinking, our own way of looking at something, and of course, what we are hearing from others.

And this is something that I want to go through with you today because I see it as something that is not intuitive. It's not something that people normally or can naturally do, and so separating what is a factual circumstance or situation versus a thought, assumption, judgment, opinion about it can be very powerful as a modern NGO leader, if you want to understand what is reality and how are our thoughts and the way we're looking at reality influencing our own behavior and our own emotions? Which [00:02:00] they do.

In cognitive behavior theory, we talk about how , we have these different layers of the way we interpret something. First, we start with a factual reality which is what everyone would agree is a factual circumstance. Then we have our interpretation of that, a thought about it. That thought creates a feeling which creates an emotion, and from that emotion, we take a particular action and we end up with a certain result. This is one of the things that I cover in part in the webinar I'm teaching right now called "How to Feel Better During Hard Times as a NGO leader". I've already done this webinar a few times and I still have many spaces left in the future for signups. So I will put a link in the [00:03:00] show notes if you're interested.

But this webinar we'll do exactly what it says, which is to give you the tools to immediately feel better about whatever it is you're experiencing right now. And that could be something leading to stress in your work or in your life, your personal life, or whatever it is. I've had several people that have taken this training already tell me that it's really helped them a lot to immediately feel like they're in a better place. So. Look in the show notes if you wanna find a link to sign up for the webinar. It's a free one hour webinar called "How to Feel Better During Hard Times As A NGO Leader". So the first step that I cover in this exercise of feeling better is, in order to understand how we're perceiving something, we need to first put our circumstance [00:04:00] or the thing that we are perceiving in factual terms.

And it sounds so easy, and yet when you really think about it, we add a lot of assumptions and judgments and perspectives to our reality, and sometimes it's hard to separate what is reality versus what is a thought, a judgment, assumption.

So why does it benefit us as a modern leader to separate facts from non facts?

Well, one is that we have a sense of what reality is, what the facts are when we take a look. When we take a step back and look at what is the factual circumstance or situation here, we're able to separate what is the reality that everyone would agree on versus [00:05:00] what is our own thinking or our own perspective or assumptions or judgments.

It also helps us because our thinking in general, as part of our survival as humans tends to trend more towards worse case scenarios or exaggerate things. And that is so that we can be better prepared. And also it's to keep us safe. Our brains want us to take less risk, and so when we exaggerate a circumstance or a reality in our mind, then we're less likely to take risks because we already feel like there's a big risk.

So it's helpful to understand how much we are exaggerating our reality versus what is the factual circumstance. And then also our thinking tends to fill in [00:06:00] gaps which create judgments and assumptions. This is also where, bias might come in, which may keep us from acting the way we would otherwise if we were looking at something from facts only.

So some common mistakes that prevent us from separating factual reality or circumstance from our own perceptions, assumptions, and judgements is one, a lot of times when we are thinking of a a situation we are in, we generalize it. In other words, we use generalized terms such as a lot or many.

So for example, maybe when we're thinking about what is our factual reality, you write that you get feedback from many people [00:07:00] who say you need to communicate better.

So the words, many and a lot are very general. One person's definition of a lot or many might be different from another person's. And like I said just now, we tend to exaggerate and that means that when we say something like a lot, like a lot of people are giving us feedback about our communication style, a lot could actually mean three.

When you put it into actual quantifiable terms instead of just a general term, like a lot or many or hardly any, something like that you have a better sense of what is actually happening. So. I have had students in the past who have said, my direct report is [00:08:00] late to work all of the time. And when I ask, well, if you were to put that into quantifiable terms, what it would be? Then they might say something like, oh, well actually they're late one day out of the last month. So that is a big difference, right? Like a lot of the time to me is a lot more than one day out of the last month.

But sometimes when we put things in such vague terms or general terms, then we tend to have a misjudgment about what is actually true.

So that is one common mistake is when we're describing our factual reality, using too generalized terms. Another one is using too exaggerated terms. So for example, always or never. It is rare that something [00:09:00] always happens or never happens. And so whenever I see those words I usually question how true they are. So once again, the more you can put things in actual factual, quantifiable terms, the better. So rather than saying something like, this project always needs help. That means that it permanently needs help all the time, which doesn't really make any sense. But also needing help what does that mean? Right? So putting it in for factual circumstances, you might say something like, this project has had three times where we've had to stop the project because of [00:10:00] late procurements. Something like that. So you see the difference.

One is very specific, has a number three times that we've stopped the project. And that stopping the project is a fact because it's, it's either stopped or it's not. Versus this project needs help all of the time.

Also assuming you know what someone else is thinking or feeling. So sometimes it seems like a fact that this person is mad at me, for example. But we can't prove that, right? We can't prove other people's thoughts or emotions, and so it is not a factual circumstance. The factual circumstance might be something like, this person has not spoken to me in two weeks. And so then your [00:11:00] assumption is that they're mad at you.

Another thing also that's very common mistake, when thinking about putting something in factual circumstances is saying that something has already happened. That as if it is a fact, but it has not yet happened. So for example, they are going to cut my funding,

versus I am waiting to hear about funding cuts. Because they are going to cut my funding we don't know for sure if it has happened or will happen or not. Right? Unless you've gotten a letter saying that it will happen. Then you can put, my funding will be cut by this date. Right? But putting something like they're going to do this is not a fact because it has not happened yet.

So once again, [00:12:00] common mistakes when trying to put things into factual terms, which can help us separate our judgments and assumptions from reality are using too generalized terms and not quantifiable ones. Exaggerating such as always or never, assuming or putting something as a fact that is not a fact, such as someone else's thoughts or feelings, which we would never be able to prove in a court of law and saying something that as if it has already happened or is a fact, even though it has not happened yet.

Some questions that you can ask yourself are one, is this really factual? Like is this really something that could be proven in a court of law or that the majority of people on the planet would agree? Number two, are there [00:13:00] any general terms that can be quantified or can be more specific?

And then finally number three, are there any judgements or assumptions in the way you're phrasing this? So for example, she does not like me, is not a fact, right? This is not something we can prove in court of law. Now, she maybe has not talked to me in the last three weeks or has not emailed me, but the assumption would be that that means that she does not like me.

You see why it can be really beneficial to separate what is the factual circumstance versus our interpretation of it, which may or may not be true? Once you have things in facts, then you can look at them more clearly without all the layers of judgment and assumptions that [00:14:00] we normally do. And you can then question

what is my interpretation of this and how accurate is my interpretation of this? And this is exactly what we do in this free webinar that I'm offering called "How to Feel Better During Hard Times as an NGO Leader". So once again, if you wanna learn more, join us for the free webinar. I will put the links in the show notes so you can find it there.

You'll learn some really quick exercises to immediately start to feel better. And, even taking this first step of what we talked about today and putting things in facts versus assumptions or opinions can really dramatically help us to calm our nervous system down, to calm our thinking down so that we're not acting from a place of [00:15:00] exaggerated reality, but from actual facts. Okay?

So until next week, keep evolving. Bye for now.

Are you the type of leader that tells others what to do? Or do you let them figure it out for themselves? Understanding your leadership style is the first step to deciding what's working for you and what's not. To find out your leadership style, take my free quiz "what is your leadership style?" You'll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team, and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.

Just click on the link in the show notes, www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz fill out your quiz and click submit. So what are you waiting for? Go to www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz and discover your leadership style now. [00:16:00] Your team will thank you for it!