You walk into a store and start looking around and find something you like, so you take it up to the register. The woman behind the counter sees you coming, frowns, and walks away to the back room. Do you explain her actions to yourself one of these ways?
"I'm bothering her and she doesn't want to deal with another customer."
"She thinks I don't belong in the store and don't intend to buy something."
"She's mad at me because I'm only buying one item."
We could continue these self explanations all day.
When my son was little, I wanted to teach him to park his ego and practice healthy mental hygiene because we tend to explain everything in relation to ourselves as if we somehow cause things to happen or instigate events. We would be out and about and we might witness someone slamming their car trunk and shoving their grocery cart angrily into the cart corral. I'd say, "Alex, what's up with that person?" He'd say something like "He forgot to buy something and he doesn't want to go back and get it but he knows his wife'll chew him out when he gets home." I'd say, "His trunk doesn't work on his car so he has to slam it and he shoved the cart into the corral to be sure it didn't roll back out and hit a car." We'd continue on back and forth until we ran out of explanations. The lesson for him was, "until you approach someone and ask them for an honest answer, you may never know why they do what they do."
The store clerk above (this actually happened to me) had to go in back to get her manager because it was her first day on the job and she couldn't use the register. Imagine if I left that store thinking like the person above who believed the clerk thought she was not of the caliber to shop there? That woman might never come back to that store, feeling it was humiliating to shop there. Wow!
The point of today's inspiration is that you can list a shitload of reasons why someone did something, but you won't know which one it was and acting on something you told yourself in your head is like saying that Starbucks has to be located near other stores because it gets lonely if it's not in a crowded space. The correlations may make no logical sense, but some people jump from point A to point B with an unguided jet pack.
Look into your thoughts some time, how you explain things that happen during the day. Take note of how many times you explain things in relation to yourself. "She thinks my hair is goofy, I saw her looking at it." "They aren't getting another contract because I barely finished the last one on time." "She's angry because I didn't give her a back rub last night."