There’s a line in Crucial Conversations worth memorizing:

“Why would a reasonable, rational, and decent person do what this person is doing?”

Most of our behaviors aren’t irrational. Some of them are unconscious, but people rarely do things for “bad” reasons.

Everyone sees themselves as the “good guy” in the story. This means they must be doing this action for a rational reason. It’s solving a problem for them. It’s in service to something they value.

And it might be completely and totally awful to a great many other people. But the first step in fixing something is to understand it.

You might not know why right away, but it’s worth sitting with the question. It might help you find the solution to irrationality.