Episode 343. Intention and perception (you own both)

Solo

Oct 20

This episode of The Art of Entrepreneurship is for founders and leaders whose good intentions keep landing the wrong way with their team.

Every one of us assigns positive intentions to ourselves and negative intentions to everyone else, because we have access to our own reasons and can only see other people’s behavior. That gap sits at the root of most of the friction I’ve seen inside a company, and a beautiful intention doesn’t count for much when the other person only experienced your actions.

In this episode, I share a recent conversation with a team member who is sensitive on the inside and can read as cold on the outside, and why the outside is what her coworkers respond to. I also get into why the wall between business and personal goes back up under stress, and why old patterns feel safe even when they’re bad for you.

From there, I walk through what to actually do:

Ask how something came across instead of whether it made sense
Replace “that’s not what I meant” with a response that validates the other person’s experience
Name your stress default to your team before it shows up
Repair small misunderstandings within a day (before they become a story people tell about you)

Owning your perception doesn’t mean managing every feeling anyone has about you, but it does mean taking responsibility when the same gap keeps showing up. Good intentions are the floor, not the achievement.

Tune in if you’re ready to stop defending what you meant and start owning how it lands.