Assuming Good Intent

The Gap Between Your Intentions and Their Impact

You’re twenty minutes late to dinner with Sarah, stuck in traffic that materialized from nowhere, thumb-typing apologies as your phone dies mid-message. This is exactly where assuming good intent gets hardest: you know your intentions and all the obstacles; she only sees the outcome—you’re late. When you finally arrive, breathless and full of explanations, she’s already finished her appetizer.

“I’m so sorry,” you say, launching into the tale of unexpected construction, a missed turn, the charger that quit at the worst possible moment. “I left exactly when I planned to, but everything went wrong.” In moments like this, assuming good intent is a bridge you hope she’ll cross toward you.

Sarah nods politely, but you can see it in her eyes—the quick calculation people do when deciding whether someone is considerate or careless. You know she’s thinking about the time she was late last month, how annoyed you felt checking your watch and wondering if she didn’t prioritize your time. You meant to be punctual. She just experienced lateness. And this is where assuming good intent meets the friction of real life.

This is the fundamental asymmetry of human judgment: we experience our own lives from the inside, where intentions matter more than outcomes. We carry the full story—the effort, the obstacles, the gap between what we meant to do and what actually happened. But we experience other people from the outside, where only results are visible. Beginning by assuming good intent doesn’t erase outcomes; it widens the frame before we judge.

When you forgot your friend’s birthday, you know it wasn’t because you don’t care. You know about the deadline, the family crisis, the month that lasted three days and three years simultaneously. You remember the sick feeling when you realized, the late-night apology, the flowers you ordered. But your friend just knows you forgot. They aren’t inside your narrative—and they’re not assuming good intent; they’re seeing a result.

You think about your coworker Mike, who interrupted you three times in yesterday’s meeting. It’s easy to draft a whole personality profile: doesn’t listen, thinks his ideas are more important. What you don’t know is that his daughter was in the emergency room the night before, that he’s running on two hours of sleep and six cups of coffee, that he’s been trying to ask for time off for weeks but keeps getting pulled back into urgent projects. He drove to work practicing apologies for behavior he isn’t even sure he exhibited. If you started by assuming good intent, you could still name the impact—but you’d look for context before deciding his character.

The cruelest part of this bias is how it bends our closest relationships. Your partner forgets to pick up milk after you specifically asked. Clearly they don’t listen, don’t care about contributing, don’t respect your time—or so the story goes. When you forget the milk, it’s because the day was impossible, a stressful call hijacked your brain, and seventeen responsibilities shouted louder. The same error, two explanations: theirs is character; yours is circumstance. Starting with assuming good intent doesn’t refill the fridge; it simply helps you ask better questions and design better reminders.

Your therapist asks why you’re so hard on yourself about the promotion you didn’t get. You describe the plan: network more, take higher-profile projects, speak up in meetings. The gap between intention and execution feels like a personal failing. “What if your colleague who got the promotion just acted differently,” she suggests, “rather than intending differently?” You’ve been judging yourself by the elaborate infrastructure of your intentions and your colleague by the stark fact of their success. Maybe the difference wasn’t moral but practical: follow-through, timing, or luck. Even with yourself, assuming good intent—toward your own efforts—can soften shame and redirect you toward concrete change.

Other people get the clean scorecard of actions completed or not completed. We get the messy transcript of every attempt and almost. That’s why our private standards feel merciless: we know how much we meant to be better, do better, show up better, and we carry the weight of every plan that met reality and lost.

Standing in the coffee-shop line, you watch the barista move slowly, methodically, while customers check their phones. Someone mutters about poor service. But you notice the careful hands, the double-checked tickets, the small smile offered despite the rush. Maybe they’re not slow. Maybe they’re thorough. Maybe what looks like poor performance is good intentions executed under pressure. Here, too, assuming good intent changes the story you tell.

You think about giving everyone the benefit of the doubt you give yourself—assuming good intent about their motives, treating missteps as situations rather than indictments of character. It’s a difficult practice, this radical empathy. It asks you to believe that most people are trying their best with what they have, just like you are; that their worst moments aren’t their truest selves, just like yours aren’t.

None of this means abandoning boundaries or ignoring data. You can start by assuming good intent and still name impact, set limits, and ask for different behavior next time. Mercy in the headline, precision in the body.

Maybe the goal isn’t perfect judgment but equal mercy—extending to others the generous interpretation you offer yourself, and to yourself the clear-eyed assessment you offer others. Maybe we’re all just trying to close the gap between who we mean to be and who we manage to be on any given day. If there’s a path across that gap, it’s probably small and human-sized: a pause, a question, a repair—a habit of assuming good intent that leaves room for better outcomes.