If you want to understand humans or a situation generated by humans, you need to know their assumptions. But don’t ask them! And if you want to understand yourself, sometimes the best answer exists in another person. Studies have shown that other people can be better at predicting our behavior—at usefully predicting us—than we ourselves are

When you fail to predict correctly, however, the opposite of tranquility occurs: You feel negative emotions, and your perception is flooded with all the accompanying sensations. Your assumptions failed you, meaning that a useful predictive perception wasn’t within your space of possibility. Thus, the negativity that you feel upon entering a conflict (with yourself, with another, or with the world) is simply a reflection of the fact that what is happening now is not consistent with what you think “should” be happening; that is, the meanings from the present don’t match past meanings. The interesting thing is that when you are consciously aware of your assumptions going into a situation, even if your assumptions aren’t met, your emotional reaction will be less severe because you weren’t blind to the forces that were shaping your perception in the first place