I was short with someone in a meeting recently, and I know exactly why: a bad week, too little sleep, and a problem I could not put down. What interests me is that when someone else is short in a meeting, that explanation almost never occurs to me. They were short because they are abrasive. It is who they are.

Psychologists call this the fundamental attribution error, and the asymmetry is remarkably stable: we explain our own behaviour by circumstance and other people's by character. All I can observe is the behaviour, and in the absence of context, character is the only available explanation.

The cost is higher than it looks, because the two explanations lead to completely different actions. If someone is difficult by nature, there is nothing to be done and the file is closed. If someone is under pressure I cannot see, then a question might open the whole thing up. The useful discipline is simply to notice when you have reached a conclusion about someone's personality and to treat that as a prompt to ask rather than as a finding. So, as a reflection for today: who have you written off as difficult? And what would you need to know about their situation to reconsider?