The Story We Tell About Ourselves
Years ago, I was venting to my manager about a colleague. I was frustrated with his unique ability to kill an idea, even really good ones. He was so negative.
My manager listened. Then he asked one question: “And what happens if he’s right?”
It gave me pause.
It was clear that I hadn’t been curious about my colleague’s concern. I’d been frustrated that he was interrupting the momentum. And somewhere in that frustration, I’d stopped seeing a person with a perspective and started seeing him as an obstacle. The negative one. The one who always slows things down.
As it turned out, we were both a little bit right. His concern was a real risk worth mitigating. My idea had merit worth pursuing. But I couldn’t see any of that while I was holding onto the label that he was an idea killer. Once my manager helped me past it, I could investigate the concern instead of resenting the person raising it — and my work got better because of it.
What I didn’t see at the time — what took me much longer to understand — is that the label on my colleague was only half the story. The other half was the story I was telling about myself.
I’ve been writing about a pattern — what happens when we collapse a whole human into a single word. It runs in politics, in families, and in meeting rooms. Last week, I wrote about how it operates on certainty. This week, I want to look at the part we rarely examine.
It’s not just that we label people. It’s what the label does for us.
When I labeled my colleague “the negative one,” I wasn’t just collapsing him into a label. I was lifting myself up. I was the one with a vision. The one driving things forward. The one who actually cared about making progress. And once I’d built that story about myself, his resistance wasn’t just inconvenient — it was confirmation. Proof that I was right about him. Proof that I was the one holding things together.
This happens everywhere. The team that considers itself agile and innovative, while creating chaos for the department down the hall. The department down the hall feels operationally excellent, while dragging their feet on everything the other team is trying to build. Same organization. Same reality. Two stories, and both end the same way: we’re the ones holding this place together.
Very often, when we collapse someone into a label, we lift ourselves up in the same breath. And because the lifting feels like clarity — like discernment, like standards — we almost never catch ourselves doing it.¹
Perhaps you’ve been in one of those meetings where ideas are flowing, and people are aligning. And just when the momentum starts building, someone says, “We tried that once…” As they finish their sentence, an inaudible “UGH” sweeps the momentum right out of the room.
And something subtle happens. The label lands on them — and the group’s identity gets stronger. We’re the creative ones. We’re the ones with momentum. Ready, fire, aim — disguised as innovation. That’s how othering begins.
But the person who said, “We tried that once,” might have been the only one in the room doing the harder cognitive work. Stress-testing. Protecting the team from a decision that feels great on the whiteboard and falls apart on contact with reality. Instead of getting curious about the concern, the group got annoyed that someone saw a flaw they didn’t want to see. And once they pushed that person into the “negative” box, the story wrote itself — we’re the ones with vision. With energy. With drive.
The cost isn’t just to the person carrying the label. When the critical voice has to be brave to speak, most people won’t bother. The concerns don’t disappear. They go underground — into hallway conversations, into silence during meetings, into the quiet decision to stop offering what the room has made clear it doesn’t want.
And the team keeps moving. Energized. Aligned. Certain. Right up until the thing nobody mentioned becomes the thing everyone is scrambling to fix.
So, what does it look like to interrupt that pattern?
My manager did it with five words. What happens if he’s right? He didn’t defend my colleague. He didn’t tell me I was wrong. He just opened a door I’d sealed shut. And once I walked through it, I could do the actual work — investigate the concern, capture the risk, and make a better decision because of it.
If you don’t build space for the critical voice into the conversation, someone will fill the role anyway — and they’ll pay for it with a label. The most innovative teams aren’t the ones with the most energy in the room. They’re the ones where raising a concern doesn’t feel so risky.
That means building moments where critical thinking is expected, not just tolerated. Where “what could go wrong?” is as valued as “what’s possible?” Not because pessimism is a virtue — but because a plan that can’t survive a hard question was never a plan at all. It was enthusiasm with a deadline.
And it means catching the exceptionalism story in yourself. The next time you feel that surge of group identity — that warm sense of we’re the ones who get it — pause. Ask: who have we decided doesn’t? And what might they be seeing that we’ve made too expensive to say?
This is what we mean by compassionate accountability. Not lowering the bar. Raising it — by making it safe to stress-test the ideas we’re most attached to. Holding people to high standards without needing the story that says our standards make us better than the person questioning them.
The person in your next meeting who slows things down might be protecting you from a mistake you can’t see yet. Or they might be wrong. But you’ll never know which one it is if the label lands before curiosity starts.
Eyes open.
1This pattern is well-documented in social psychology. Henri Tajfel’s research on Social Identity Theory (1979) demonstrated that people will favor their own group based on distinctions as arbitrary as a coin flip — not because of real conflict, but because group membership activates a need for positive distinctiveness. A 2024 meta-analysis by Rivera, Vu, and Backstrom (103 studies, 15,000+ participants) confirmed the relationship between ingroup favoritism and self-esteem. We don’t just want to belong. We want our group to be better.