The Assumptions That Quietly Shape Your Leadership: Why Great Leaders Learn to Question the Story Before They Change the Strategy
- Sarah Beth Herman
- Jul 30
- 11 min read
By Sarah Beth Herman, MBA, Founder & CEO, Dentistry Support®
If there's one thing leadership has taught me over the years, it's that very few decisions begin in the moment we make them. They begin long before the meeting, long before the difficult conversation, and long before we decide whether to hire someone, let someone go, invest in a new idea, or change the direction of a business. Most of our decisions begin with something much quieter. They begin with the story we've already started telling ourselves.
I've spent years working alongside dental practices throughout the country, and if I've learned anything from those experiences, it's that two intelligent, experienced leaders can look at the exact same situation and come away believing two completely different things. One sees an opportunity while the other sees a warning. One becomes curious while the other becomes convinced they already know the answer. Neither leader is intentionally ignoring reality, but neither is responding to reality alone. More often than not, they're responding to the meaning they've attached to what they're seeing, and that meaning quietly shapes every decision that follows.
That realization completely changed the way I think about leadership. For years, I believed becoming a better leader meant learning better strategies. Read another book. Attend another conference. Improve communication. Build stronger systems. Those things matter, and I'd never suggest otherwise.
Dentistry Support® was built on helping practices improve operations, strengthen revenue cycle management, and create healthier workflows because systems absolutely matter. But somewhere along the way I realized something I hadn't considered before: before any strategy is ever discussed, a leader has already made a series of invisible decisions. They've decided what they believe the problem is, why it's happening, who's responsible, and what it all means. The strategy comes afterward. Interpretation always comes first.
That's why two businesses can experience nearly identical circumstances and produce completely different outcomes. It isn't usually because one owner is dramatically smarter than the other. It's because they started with different assumptions. We spend countless hours teaching leaders how to communicate, build culture, increase profitability, and motivate teams, yet we spend remarkably little time talking about the conversation leaders are having with themselves before they ever speak to anyone else.
In my experience, that's often the conversation that matters most. I remember sitting with a practice owner who was convinced his front office had stopped caring. From where he sat, the evidence seemed overwhelming. Phones weren't being answered as quickly as they once had been. Patients were waiting longer for callbacks. A few responsibilities had slipped through the cracks, and the energy inside the office felt noticeably different. As he explained what was happening, I noticed that every explanation came with complete confidence. The team had become lazy. They'd stopped taking ownership. They simply didn't care anymore.
The interesting thing was that none of those conclusions had come from conversations with his team. They had come from the story he had built around what he was observing. So I asked him a question that seemed almost too simple: What if none of that is true?
He didn't answer immediately. Instead, he paused. Not because he agreed with me, but because the question interrupted something he hadn't realized was happening. Over the next week, he met individually with every member of his staff. What he discovered was something entirely different from the story he'd been telling himself. No one had stopped caring. The team was carrying responsibilities that had quietly accumulated after another employee left, and no one had ever clearly reassigned ownership. Everyone assumed someone else was handling the work. The problem wasn't commitment. It was clarity.
That conversation has stayed with me for years because it illustrates something I continue to see in leadership. The circumstances hadn't changed overnight. The phones were still ringing. The workload hadn't disappeared. The office hadn't suddenly become less busy. The first thing that changed wasn't the business at all—it was the leader's interpretation of what was happening. Once that shifted, the conversations changed. Once the conversations changed, the solutions became much easier to see.
I've found that leadership works this way more often than we realize. Our minds don't particularly like uncertainty. When information is incomplete, we naturally begin filling in the blanks. Sometimes those assumptions are accurate. Sometimes they're remarkably wrong. The challenge is that our brains rarely tell us which is which. Assumptions have an incredible ability to arrive dressed as facts, and because they feel true, we rarely stop to question them.
Why Our Minds Fill in the Blanks
The more I paid attention to this pattern in leadership, the more I began noticing it in my own life. It wasn't just happening in boardrooms or dental practices. It happened in ordinary moments too. I'd send an email and wonder why someone hadn't responded. I'd leave a meeting replaying a conversation in my head, convinced I'd said the wrong thing. I'd make assumptions about why a client made a particular decision before I'd ever asked a single question.
Looking back, I realized I wasn't responding to facts nearly as often as I thought I was. More often, I was responding to my interpretation of the facts. Once I recognized that pattern, I couldn't stop seeing it. I began wondering why our minds seem so eager to create explanations. Why do we feel compelled to finish the story before we know how it ends? Why does uncertainty feel so uncomfortable that we'll often invent an answer simply to avoid sitting with the unknown?
Those questions eventually led me into neuroscience, and what I discovered surprised me.
For years, I assumed the brain functioned much like a camera. Something happened, we observed it, processed it, and then reacted. It seemed like the most logical explanation. Experience something, gather the facts, make a decision. That's not actually how the brain works. Researchers now understand that the brain spends far less time passively observing the world than it does predicting it.
Long before we're consciously aware of what's happening around us, our brains are already making educated guesses based on previous experiences, memories, emotions, and patterns they've stored over a lifetime. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett describes this as predictive processing. Rather than waiting for every piece of information to arrive, the brain continuously fills in missing information so it can respond as efficiently as possible (Barrett, 2017).
When you think about it, that makes perfect sense. Thousands of years ago, waiting for complete information wasn't always an option. If our ancestors heard movement in the trees, they didn't have the luxury of conducting an investigation before deciding whether to run.
A brain that anticipated danger was far more likely to survive than one that insisted on absolute certainty. Our environment has changed dramatically since then. Our biology hasn't. Most of us aren't making life-or-death decisions in the middle of a forest anymore, but our brains still approach uncertainty in much the same way. Only now the "threats" tend to look very different. They're unanswered emails. Unexpected resignations.
A patient who suddenly postpones treatment. A production report that doesn't reflect the month you expected. A conversation that feels slightly different than it did the week before.
In those moments, our brains instinctively begin asking a familiar question: What does this mean?
The challenge is that the brain doesn't particularly enjoy leaving that question unanswered. It starts connecting dots almost immediately, pulling from past experiences to build an explanation that feels logical enough to move forward.
Sometimes that explanation is remarkably accurate. Other times it's built on very little evidence at all.
The difficulty is that confidence and accuracy don't always arrive together.
One of the healthiest leadership habits I've had to develop over the years is learning to separate what I know from what I think I know. At first glance, those ideas seem almost identical. In practice, they're worlds apart.
I know a client hasn't responded.
I think they're no longer interested.
I know production declined this month.
I think the practice is losing momentum.
I know an employee seems quieter than usual.
I think they're disengaged.
Notice what happens in each example. The observable fact is relatively small. The interpretation is much larger. Yet because our minds move so quickly, the interpretation often begins feeling just as certain as the fact itself. Daniel Kahneman devoted much of his career to studying this phenomenon. His research showed that the brain relies on mental shortcuts—what psychologists call heuristics—to help us process an overwhelming amount of information every day (Kahneman, 2011). Without those shortcuts we'd struggle to function. Imagine having to consciously evaluate every decision, every facial expression, every conversation, or every traffic light you encountered throughout the day. We'd never accomplish anything. Those shortcuts are incredibly efficient.
They're also imperfect. The longer we lead, the more patterns we naturally begin recognizing. Experience teaches us what healthy businesses look like. We learn to identify warning signs earlier. We develop instincts that often serve us well. Experience is one of leadership's greatest gifts. It can also become one of its greatest blind spots.
I've watched leaders mistake pattern recognition for certainty more times than I can count. A difficult employee leaves, and suddenly every new hire is viewed through the lens of that experience.
Insurance reimbursements decline, and every financial challenge becomes "an insurance problem." One difficult patient interaction quietly changes the way an entire team begins approaching future patients.
The pattern itself isn't the problem.
The assumption that every future situation must fit that pattern is.
One experience becomes a filter through which every new experience is interpreted.
That's where curiosity becomes so valuable.
Curiosity slows the process down just enough to create space between observation and conclusion. It asks questions before assigning meaning. It leaves room for the possibility that today's circumstances may require a different explanation than yesterday's.
I've come to believe that's one of the defining characteristics of mature leadership.
Not certainty.
Not decisiveness.
Discernment.
Discernment recognizes that experience is valuable, but it also understands that every situation deserves to be seen on its own merits. It resists the temptation to recycle yesterday's answers for today's problems.
That kind of leadership requires humility because it means admitting we don't always have the full picture. As leaders, we often feel pressure to have answers quickly. Our teams look to us for direction. Our clients expect confidence. Our businesses depend on timely decisions. But confidence and curiosity are not opposites.
In fact, the strongest leaders I've known have demonstrated both at the same time. They're confident enough to make decisions when necessary, yet humble enough to revisit those decisions when new information comes to light. They understand that changing your mind isn't a sign of weakness. Sometimes it's evidence that you're paying attention.
Viktor Frankl once wrote that between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space lies our freedom to choose our response (Frankl, 2006). Leadership exists in that space. It's the brief moment between what happens and the meaning we assign to it. The wider we can make that space, the more thoughtful our decisions become.
That's easier said than done.
Our brains will always try to write the story quickly.
The work of leadership is learning when to set the pen down before we've finished the ending.
The Story Worth Questioning
The longer I lead, the less convinced I become that great leadership is about having better answers. I think it's about asking better questions. That may sound like a subtle distinction, but I don't believe it is. Answers tend to bring closure. Questions create curiosity. And curiosity has a remarkable way of exposing assumptions we didn't even realize we were carrying.
Over the years, I've worked with practice owners who believed their teams had stopped caring, only to discover they were overwhelmed. I've seen offices blame insurance companies for declining collections when the real issue was an inconsistent internal process. I've watched business owners convince themselves that growth had stalled because of market conditions, when the real obstacle was a decision they'd been postponing for months.
None of those leaders lacked intelligence.
None of them lacked work ethic.
They were simply responding to the story they believed was true. If there's one lesson I've learned from leading organizations, it's that our assumptions quietly shape the future long before our strategies ever have the chance to. The conversations we avoid, the conclusions we rush toward, and the explanations we create in moments of uncertainty all influence the culture we're building and the decisions we're making.
That's why I believe one of the most valuable leadership skills isn't communication.
It isn't strategy.
It isn't even vision.
It's self-awareness.
The willingness to stop long enough to ask, "What do I actually know, and what have I assumed?"
That question has changed the way I lead. It has changed the way I manage difficult conversations, evaluate business challenges, and understand the people around me. More importantly, it's changed the way I understand myself. Because leadership isn't just about learning how to influence others. It's about learning how to recognize the stories influencing you.
Perhaps that's the real work of leadership. Not becoming someone who always has the right answer, but becoming someone humble enough to question their own conclusions before asking everyone else to follow them. As you move into your week, I want to leave you with one challenge.
The next time something doesn't make sense, resist the urge to explain it immediately.
Sit with it for a moment.
Ask another question.
Have another conversation.
Gather one more piece of information. You may discover that the story you've been telling yourself isn't the only one available. And sometimes, changing the story changes everything.
Continue the Conversation
This article serves as a preview of this week's episode of No Silver Spoons, where I explore this topic in greater depth in The Human Side of Leadership™ Summer Series.
In Episode 134: The Stories We Tell Ourselves, we'll explore why two people can experience the exact same event and leave with completely different conclusions, what neuroscience teaches us about the stories our brains naturally create, and how learning to question those stories may be one of the most important leadership skills you'll ever develop.
Whether you're leading a dental practice, growing a business, managing a team, or simply trying to become a better leader in your own life, I hope you'll join me for the conversation.
About the Author
Sarah Beth Herman, MBA is the Founder and CEO of Dentistry Support®, an award-winning dental practice support organization serving dental practices throughout the United States. Under her leadership, the organization has supported hundreds of practices by improving operational efficiency, strengthening revenue cycle management, and helping teams build healthier systems and stronger cultures. Sarah Beth is also the creator and host of the No Silver Spoons podcast, where she shares practical insights on leadership, entrepreneurship, organizational psychology, and business growth. Through The Human Side of Leadership™ Journal and podcast series, she explores the intersection of neuroscience, leadership, and organizational culture to help business owners lead with greater clarity, intention, and confidence.
Learn more at www.DentistrySupport.com.
References
Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Brown, B. (2018). Dare to lead: Brave work. Tough conversations. Whole hearts. Random House.
Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man's search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Rock, D. (2008). SCARF: A brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others. NeuroLeadership Journal, 1, 44–52.
Disclaimer:
To learn more about Sarah Beth Herman, the author of all free training content you can read her bio here. These materials are intended to provide helpful information to dentists and dental team members. They are in no way a substitute for actual professional advice based on your unique facts and circumstances. This content is not intended or offered, nor should it be taken, as legal or other professional advice. You should always consult with your own professional advisors (e.g. attorney, accountant, or insurance carrier). To the extent, Dentistry Support ®has included links to any third-party website (s), Dentistry Support ® intends no endorsement of their content and implies no affiliation with the organizations that provide their content. Further, Dentistry Support ® makes no representations or warranties about the information provided on those sites. You can view our privacy policy and terms and conditions by clicking those pages in the footer of our website
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