How do I catch the thinking patterns that are quietly skewing my decisions?

In coaching conversations, I rarely hear people describe their conclusions as interpretations. They describe them as facts: he’s avoiding me, she’s lost confidence in me, this relationship is deteriorating, the project is heading for failure. The certainty arrives at the same moment as the thought, which is exactly what makes it hard to question.

Any of those conclusions could be right. That’s precisely what makes them difficult to catch. Distorted thinking rarely announces itself by sounding ridiculous. More often, it takes something plausible, adds more certainty than the evidence deserves and quietly starts organising what you notice next. The problem isn’t that the first interpretation is necessarily wrong. It’s that it can begin shaping what you notice, how you feel and what you do before you’ve recognised that there were other ways of reading the same situation.

What this actually buys you as a leader of yourself

A leader who can’t distinguish what happened from what they’ve concluded about it becomes surprisingly easy to steer, not only by other people, but by their own thinking. If you decide someone is hostile, you listen differently to their questions. If you conclude a project is failing, setbacks become more salient than signs of progress. If you’re convinced an important presentation went badly, the awkward answer you gave can dominate your memory while the twenty minutes that went perfectly well almost disappear.

The goal isn’t endless self-doubt. Leaders have to form judgements with incomplete information and act before certainty arrives. The useful skill is knowing when an interpretation has become consequential enough to examine. A passing assumption about why someone missed a meeting may not matter very much. An assumption about their commitment that starts affecting what work you give them, how much you trust them or what you say about them to others certainly does.

That makes the distinction between what happened, what you think it means and what you’re going to do about it particularly important. The three can collapse into one another remarkably quickly. “They haven’t replied” becomes “they’re avoiding me”, which becomes “I need to escalate this”. By the time you reach the action, the interpretation in the middle can be almost invisible.

Catching your thinking gives you somewhere to intervene. You may still reach exactly the same conclusion and take exactly the same action. The difference is that the conclusion has survived some examination rather than winning simply because it arrived first.

Why it matters

The idea that recurring patterns of interpretation can shape how we experience situations has deep roots in cognitive psychology. Aaron Beck’s cognitive theory identified patterns such as catastrophising, overgeneralisation, all-or-nothing thinking, selective attention and drawing conclusions without sufficient evidence, initially in the context of understanding psychological distress (Beck, 1976). It would be a mistake to turn every ordinary error of judgement into a clinical problem, but there is a useful broader insight here: our interpretations can develop recognisable habits, and the habit tends to be more personal than situational. One leader repeatedly jumps from a setback to the worst plausible outcome; another fills ambiguous behaviour with assumptions about motive. Knowing the names of these patterns isn’t enough to protect you from them. The harder skill is recognising what your thinking is doing while you are still inside the judgement.

Psychologists use the term metacognition for this broader capacity to monitor and evaluate our own thinking. Contemporary research on metacognition has paid particular attention to confidence: not simply whether we make a judgement, but how accurately we assess the likelihood that it is correct. Fleming’s review of the field draws an important distinction between performance itself and our subjective assessment of that performance. Confidence is not a transparent reading of reality; it is itself an inference, informed by our models of the world and of our own abilities, and those models can be more or less accurate (Fleming, 2024). Feeling certain and being correct are related, but they are not the same psychological event, and once an explanation feels sufficiently convincing there is less reason to keep looking.

Research on actively open-minded thinking adds a useful layer here. Good judgement isn’t simply thinking harder about the explanation you already have; it includes a willingness to consider alternatives, respond to evidence that contradicts existing beliefs and postpone closure when the evidence doesn’t justify it. Stanovich and Toplak’s review found that measures of actively open-minded thinking predict performance across a range of heuristics and biases tasks, though they caution it is not a universal protection against biased reasoning (Stanovich and Toplak, 2023). Open-mindedness helps; it doesn’t make anyone bias-proof.

There is a related idea in research on intellectual humility: recognising the limitations of your own knowledge and beliefs. Porter and colleagues identify this metacognitive recognition as a common element across different definitions of intellectual humility (Porter et al., 2022). For a leader, it can be as practical as changing the internal sentence from “this is what is happening” to “this is currently my best explanation of what is happening.” The conclusion hasn’t changed. What has changed is whether there is still somewhere for new evidence to go.

When your interpretation starts creating its own evidence

There is another reason to catch these patterns early. An interpretation doesn’t only affect how you think about a situation; it can change how you behave inside it, and that behaviour can sometimes alter what happens next.

Social psychologists describe one version of this as behavioural confirmation: an expectation held by one person can influence how they behave towards somebody else, which can in turn elicit behaviour that appears to confirm the original expectation (Snyder and Stukas, 1999). Imagine you decide that a colleague doesn’t support you. You become slightly more guarded around them and share less information. They notice the change without necessarily knowing what caused it, so they become more cautious around you in return, and their caution now looks remarkably like evidence for the lack of support you suspected in the first place. Your original judgement may have been right, partly right or completely wrong; the important point is that once you acted from it, you were no longer simply observing the situation. You had become part of what happened next.

What we sometimes call self-sabotage can therefore be less deliberate than the label suggests. More often, an interpretation produces a protective or defensive response that makes sense given what someone currently believes, and that response can then change the interaction in ways that make the original interpretation easier to sustain. This isn’t a claim that expectations simply create reality: sometimes an interpretation is straightforwardly accurate, and sometimes other people resist the expectations placed on them. The useful leadership lesson is narrower than that: once you start behaving from an interpretation, you may become part of the evidence you later use to judge whether it was right.

That makes the more useful question less accusatory than “why do I keep sabotaging myself?” Instead: “what am I currently assuming to be true, and how is acting from that assumption changing what happens next?” Catching the interpretation earlier gives you somewhere to interrupt the loop, without needing to prove it wrong first.

Five practices for catching the thinking that skews your decisions

Exercise 1: Replay a recent decision

Thinking errors are much easier to see after the event than while they are happening, but simply looking back and deciding “I got that wrong” doesn’t teach you very much. The useful information is in the sequence: what you noticed, what you made it mean and how that interpretation shaped what you did next.

This exercise reconstructs a recent judgement so that you can see where observation became interpretation and interpretation became action.

Steps:

1. Choose a decision, conversation or judgement from the last week that didn’t go quite as expected, or where you’re now less certain about your original interpretation.
2. Draw a simple five-stage sequence: What happened → What I noticed → What I thought it meant → What I did → What happened next.
3. Reconstruct each stage as honestly as you can. Avoid correcting your past thinking with what you know now. The aim is to capture what seemed true to you at the time.
4. Go back through the sequence and mark the point where observable information became interpretation. Ask what evidence supported that interpretation and what you added through assumption.
5. Finally, ask whether your interpretation changed what happened next. Did it affect the question you asked, the tone you used, the decision you made, the person you involved or the information you stopped looking for?

Variations: If the distinction between observation and interpretation is difficult, use the camera test. Ask what a recording of the situation could actually have captured. “She interrupted me three times” might survive the test. “She doesn’t respect me” wouldn’t, because that requires interpretation.

Why it matters: The point isn’t to prove that your interpretation was wrong. It may have been exactly right. The exercise makes the thinking process visible, particularly the moment when an explanation stopped being one possibility and started driving what happened next.

Exercise 2: Build your thinking-pattern log

A list of cognitive distortions is useful for recognition, but it becomes much more useful when you discover which patterns belong to you. Most people don’t make every thinking error equally often. You may be particularly quick to infer motives when someone’s behaviour is ambiguous, turn setbacks into predictions of larger failure, reduce mixed outcomes to success or failure, or notice evidence that supports a concern more readily than evidence that challenges it.

You are unlikely to discover that pattern from one event. This exercise looks for repetition across several real situations.

Steps:

1. For one week, capture moments when you notice yourself becoming unusually certain, negative, defensive or emotionally caught by an interpretation.
2. Record four things: the situation, the automatic thought, how you responded, and the thinking move that might have been involved.
3. Don’t worry about getting the psychological label exactly right. “Assuming I know what they think”, “jumping to the worst outcome”, “turning one problem into everything” and “only noticing what confirms it” are perfectly adequate descriptions.
4. At the end of the week, review the entries together. Look for repeated moves rather than repeated situations. Which one or two ways of thinking appear most often?
5. Finish by completing the sentence: “When ______ happens, I tend to ______.” Then turn it into an early-warning trigger: “When I notice myself doing that, I will check what evidence I’m actually using.”

Variations: Ask someone who knows you well: “When I’m stressed or frustrated, what conclusions do you notice me jumping to?” Other people sometimes recognise the pattern in our thinking long before we recognise it ourselves.

Why it matters: You don’t need to monitor yourself for every cognitive distortion ever identified. Knowing your own recurring pattern gives you something much more useful: a personal signal that tells you when a conclusion deserves a closer look. The appearance of the pattern doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It means this is a judgement worth checking.

Exercise 3: Run the three-story test

Once an explanation makes sense, it has an enormous advantage over explanations you haven’t generated yet. The purpose of this exercise isn’t to replace your first interpretation with a more positive one. It is to make your preferred explanation compete against other plausible accounts of the same evidence.

This is close to abductive reasoning: working with several plausible explanations and asking which currently provides the best account of what you are seeing rather than treating the first coherent story as settled fact.

Steps:

1. Choose a live situation where you’re uncertain about what is happening and divide a page into three.
2. In the first section write “My current explanation” and describe the story you’re already telling yourself as clearly as possible.
3. In the second write “Another plausible explanation” and construct the strongest genuinely different account you can. Don’t deliberately create a weak alternative merely to make your preferred story look better.
4. In the third write “An explanation I may be avoiding” and consider whether there is a plausible account that places something uncomfortable back with you. Perhaps the team isn’t resistant to change; perhaps the purpose isn’t clear. Perhaps your manager isn’t micromanaging; perhaps you haven’t created enough visibility for them to feel comfortable stepping back.
5. For each story, write three short headings: Evidence for | Evidence against | What I would need to find out. Then decide which explanation currently fits best and what, if anything, you need to learn before acting.

Variations: For a lower-stakes judgement, one genuinely plausible rival explanation may be enough. For an important decision, generate several. The value comes from creating real competition, not hitting an arbitrary number.

Why it matters: Your original explanation may still win. Often it should. The difference is that it has survived comparison rather than winning uncontested because it happened to arrive first. The exercise also changes the question from “Can I find evidence that supports my explanation?” to “Which explanation best accounts for the evidence I actually have?”

Exercise 4: Appoint a disconfirmation partner

Some thinking is difficult to correct through more thinking alone. Once you’re invested in an interpretation, even a deliberate search for alternatives is being conducted by the same person who found the original explanation convincing. Another person can bring different experience, assumptions and attention to the same evidence.

The aim here isn’t to find someone who will disagree with you for the sake of it. It is to expose an important judgement to another mind before your preferred interpretation has hardened into the only sensible one.

Steps:

1. Choose an important live judgement or decision where you already have a preferred explanation but there is still meaningful uncertainty.
2. Find someone who can challenge you constructively and give them the situation, the relevant evidence and the important constraints. If possible, don’t initially tell them the conclusion you favour.
3. Ask: “What do you think could be going on here?” Listen for explanations, evidence or questions that didn’t occur to you.
4. Now explain your own interpretation and ask: “What would make you doubt my explanation?” Resist answering the challenge immediately. Capture it first.
5. Afterwards, compare what each of you noticed. What evidence were you weighting differently? What had you seen that they hadn’t? What had they noticed that you had discounted or overlooked? Decide whether anything should change your judgement, your confidence in it or what information you gather next.

Variations: For a major decision, ask two people independently rather than discussing it as a group. Independent perspectives are more useful here than quickly converging on a shared view.

Why it matters: Open-minded thinking isn’t the same as automatically accepting somebody else’s judgement. Your interpretation may still be stronger. The value is in discovering whether it remains strong when someone who wasn’t involved in constructing it examines the same situation.

Exercise 5: Keep a confidence-and-outcome journal

Metacognition improves when you can compare how certain you felt with what eventually happened. Without that comparison, memory makes calibration difficult. We remember being right, forget how certain we were, reinterpret what we “always knew” after the outcome becomes obvious and rarely accumulate systematic evidence about where our judgement is strong or weak.

This exercise creates that evidence over time.

Steps:

1. For your next ten meaningful judgements or predictions, write down what you currently think will happen or what you believe is true.
2. Give each one a rough confidence level. You don’t need mathematical precision: leaning towards it, around 60%; probable, around 75%; highly confident, around 90% is enough.
3. Write one sentence explaining why you have that level of confidence and one piece of evidence that would substantially lower it.
4. When the outcome becomes clearer, return to the entry before allowing yourself to rewrite the story in hindsight. Record what happened and what you had missed, overestimated or judged well.
5. After ten entries, look across them rather than judging each one separately. Where are you well calibrated? Where are you consistently too certain or too doubtful? Are you better calibrated about technical problems than people’s motives, more pessimistic about difficult conversations than project outcomes, or more confident when you have numbers than when you are reading relationships?

Variations: Use the journal only for one recurring category of judgement, such as project timelines, hiring decisions, stakeholder reactions or client opportunities. This makes patterns easier to see.

Why it matters: The goal isn’t to maximise how often you are right. A person who predicts only obvious outcomes could achieve that. The deeper skill is learning whether the confidence you place in your judgement is proportionate to how reliable that judgement actually turns out to be. Fleming’s synthesis of metacognition and confidence is particularly relevant here: our assessment of how likely we are to be right is itself a judgement, and therefore something that can become better calibrated with evidence and feedback (Fleming, 2024).

Exercise wrap up

These five exercises work on different parts of the thinking process. Exercise 1 reconstructs a decision so you can see where observation became interpretation and interpretation became action. Exercise 2 looks across several situations to identify the thinking moves that recur specifically for you. Exercise 3 forces a live explanation to compete against plausible alternatives rather than winning by default. Exercise 4 brings another mind into the process, exposing your interpretation to questions and evidence you may not generate alone. And Exercise 5 creates a longer-term record of how well your confidence actually tracks the quality of your judgement.

Together, they aren’t about distrusting your judgement or endlessly delaying decisions. They’re about making your thinking visible enough that it can change when reality gives it a reason to. Most everyday decisions won’t justify that level of examination, which is where the micro-practices below come in.

Five micro-practices to start today

You don’t need to dissect every thought or turn ordinary decisions into an exercise in cognitive psychology. These five small habits take seconds and create just enough distance from an interpretation to decide whether it deserves a closer look.

• Add “I’m interpreting this as…”: When a conclusion about somebody’s motives or what an event means feels particularly obvious, silently put those words in front of it. “I’m interpreting this as her not trusting me” feels subtly different from “she doesn’t trust me.” The facts haven’t changed; the status of the conclusion has.
• Know your tell: Learn the thinking move you repeatedly make when you’re under pressure, assuming motives, predicting disaster, turning mixed evidence into either/or, or something else. Its appearance doesn’t mean you’re wrong; it means the judgement is worth checking.
• Find one other explanation: Before acting on a troubling interpretation, generate one genuinely plausible alternative. You don’t need ten possibilities. One good rival is enough to stop the first explanation winning uncontested.
• Ask what would change your mind: Before gathering more evidence for an important judgement, identify one thing that would make you reconsider it. If the answer is genuinely “nothing”, ask why. Sometimes the evidence really is overwhelming. At other times, you’ve quietly moved from investigating an explanation to defending one.
• Put a confidence level on it: Replace “I know” with “I’m fairly confident” or “I’m about 75% confident”. Then ask what would move that confidence in either direction. The number doesn’t need to be scientifically precise; its job is to remind you that confidence comes in degrees.

Conclusion

The thinking pattern most likely to skew your decision isn’t necessarily the most irrational or dramatic one. It’s the one you don’t notice as thinking at all.

Once an interpretation feels like an observation, it can start deciding what evidence matters, what you expect other people to do and how you respond to them before you’ve recognised that another explanation was possible. If your behaviour then changes the situation in ways that seem to confirm the original interpretation, the loop becomes harder still to see.

The answer isn’t to become suspicious of your own mind. Your ability to interpret quickly is essential, and sometimes your first judgement will be exactly right. The useful skill is recognising when a judgement matters enough to deserve a second look: separating what happened from what you’ve added, recognising the thinking patterns you repeat, giving rival explanations a genuine opportunity to compete, exposing important judgements to evidence and perspectives that could challenge them, and learning over time how much confidence your own conclusions actually deserve.

You don’t need certainty to make a decision. You need a judgement good enough to act on, held loosely enough to change when you learn something new.

Reflective questions

• Think of a judgement you’ve recently made about someone else. What did you actually observe, and what did you add through interpretation?
• When you’re under pressure, uncertain or emotionally invested, what kind of conclusion do you become unusually quick to believe?
• What belief about a current situation are you most certain about, and what evidence would genuinely make you revise it?

Explore further

• How do I stop treating what I’m not good at yet as evidence that I’ll never be good at it?: For how attribution and interpretation shape what you do after difficulty.
• Intellectual humility: For a closer look at what it means to hold your own conclusions loosely enough to update them.
• How can I make better decisions when facing uncertainty? :For using different ways of perceiving, knowing and reasoning when the situation itself is uncertain.

Sources

Beck, A.T., 1976. Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders. New York: International Universities Press.

Fleming, S.M., 2024. Metacognition and confidence: A review and synthesis. Annual Review of Psychology, 75, pp.241–268.

Porter, T., Elnakouri, A., Meyers, E.A., Shibayama, T., Jayawickreme, E. and Grossmann, I., 2022. Predictors and consequences of intellectual humility. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1, pp.524–536.

Snyder, M. and Stukas, A.A., 1999. Interpersonal processes: The interplay of cognitive, motivational, and behavioral activities in social interaction. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, pp.273–303.

Stanovich, K.E. and Toplak, M.E., 2023. Actively open-minded thinking and its measurement. Journal of Intelligence, 11(2), p.27.