Halloween traces back to Samhain, the ancient Celtic festival when people believed the boundary between the living and the dead blurred. For one night, spirits could return to walk among us.

Two thousand years later, we’re still being haunted, only now the ghosts are very much alive. They’re the clients who vanish after months of house hunting and the friends who suggest dinner and never pick a date.

The disappearing is one thing. What happens in our heads afterward is another. We replay the conversation, look for clues, wonder what we said, and land on an explanation that feels completely reasonable, even though we have almost no evidence for it.

Our brains are built to find patterns and make meaning out of whatever information we have. Most of the time that’s useful. The trouble starts when we mistake the explanation we’ve come up with for the truth.

Psychologists call one version of this the fundamental attribution error. We explain other people’s behavior as a matter of character and our own as a matter of circumstances. When we’re late, traffic was terrible. When someone else is late, they’re inconsiderate. When we forget to return a call, we’re overwhelmed. When someone forgets to return ours, they’re avoiding us.

Same behavior. Different interpretation

The stories we invent about other people usually say more about what we believe about ourselves than about anything they’ve actually done.

If you’re feeling left out, an invitation that never arrived confirms that everyone else is having more fun. If you’re worried about your business, a prospect’s hesitation becomes proof you’re losing your edge. We fill in the blanks with whatever is already on our minds.

Take the client who stops responding after a promising first meeting. You decide they went with another agent. You’re disappointed, a little embarrassed that you misread the connection, and you stop following up because you don’t want to seem desperate.

Meanwhile, the client is dealing with a sick parent, or a decision they’re not ready to make. They haven’t rejected you. They may not even know you’re waiting to hear from them. But because you’ve decided the story is over, you’ve quietly written yourself out of it.

I see this in coaching all the time. An agent reads silence as disinterest. A team leader decides a colleague is being difficult. By the time we talk about it, the original event barely matters. What we end up working through is the meaning attached to it. Once we believe our own interpretation, we start acting as though it’s true.

Sometimes, of course, our instincts are right. The client did hire another agent. The friend is annoyed. Experience teaches us to spot patterns, and there’s no reason to give up good judgment in the name of giving everyone the benefit of the doubt.

But recognizing a possibility is different from deciding it’s the only explanation. I work with clients on telling the difference between what happened and what they’ve decided it means. You know someone hasn’t returned your call. You don’t know why. Until you do, there’s room for curiosity.

Being curious doesn’t require you to ignore your instincts. You can ask a question instead of making an accusation, or follow up instead of withdrawing, and let someone else’s behavior be about them for once.

So here’s something to think about this week. What story are you telling yourself about someone right now? And what might change if you considered that you’re wrong?

Sometimes the most useful thing to do with an unfinished story is resist the urge to write the ending yourself.