Based on the Mentors & More training manual, the foundation for all mentors, in any role.
When Behavior Doesn’t Seem to Make Sense
Someone you care about goes quiet and you don’t know why. A friend snaps at you over something seemingly small. A teenager slams a door. A coworker who used to bring ideas to every meeting stops offering anything at all. Maybe it’s even you: reaching for the same habit again tonight, the one you promised yourself you were done with.
And the thought arrives: this makes no sense.
I’ve worked with tens of thousands of families and individuals over my career, and I can tell you that “it makes no sense” is a common thing I hear. I understand why it feels that way. But in my experience, it’s almost never true.
Here’s the foundational idea I want to hand you, one that changes how you see everything people do, including what you do yourself: behavior is always purposeful, even when it doesn’t seem to be. Every behavior is intentional, whether the person is consciously aware of it or not. Every behavior, even the confusing ones, even the destructive ones, is an attempt to accomplish something.
Behavior isn’t random. It’s a message. Every action distills into a message, and that message is either positive and beneficial or negative and detrimental. Once you learn to read the message, you stop wrestling with the behavior and start dealing with what’s actually driving it.
🎥 Watch | Every Behavior Is a Message: James introduces the idea behind this post in under a minute. Watch on YouTube »
What Every Behavior Is Trying to Do
In the Effective Mindset Training System I developed over decades of work with children, adolescents, parents, individuals, teams, families, and organizations, we teach that all behavior attempts to realize one of two outcomes:
- To generate or acquire messages that are of value: good, positive, pleasant, fulfilling.
- To avoid messages that are unpleasant, uncomfortable, negative, or detrimental.
That’s it. The quiet withdrawal, the sharp word, the little lie, the habit that won’t let go: each one falls into one of those two categories. The person is either reaching for something they need or protecting themselves from something they’d rather not experience. Often both at once.
What are they reaching for? We call them resources. Some are tangible: food, shelter, rest. But the ones that quietly drive most of our behavior are what we call intangible, message-based resources. Some people call them emotional needs. Same thing. Resources like:
- Significance: “I matter. I’m needed. I contributed.”
- Freedom: “I have some genuine say over my own life.”
- Connection and acceptance: affection, trust, belonging, being truly known.
- Safety: “I am at peace. No threats, no harm.”
Understand this clearly: you need these resources. They allow you to be, to function, and to progress forward. They are not optional; they are necessary, super necessary. Think of them as internal bins that need to stay filled. When the bins are reasonably full, a person tends to be comfortable, fulfilled, and at their best. When one runs low, discomfort shows up, and that’s not a flaw. Discomfort is an alarm system, a gauge on the dashboard signaling that a resource is running lower than it should and needs topping up. Run at a deficit long enough and it destroys your ability and your willingness to be and act positive. People operating on empty bins tend to react in survival mode.
Here’s the catch: many people can’t tell you their significance bin is running on empty. They may not know it themselves. So they act. And when someone hasn’t learned to fill a need in a healthy way, they’ll find another way, because everything we think, do, or say is an attempt to fill up resources so we don’t experience the sadness of deprivation.
Reading the Message
Let me show you what this looks like in everyday life.
The person who pushes back on everything. When someone seems to argue about every little thing, they’re very often reaching for one thing: some genuine say over their own life. Somewhere along the line, their sense of freedom got smaller than they could live with, and now each interaction carries an effort to reclaim a piece of it. The delivery may be hard to receive. The need underneath is real and legitimate: every human being needs some genuine influence over their own existence.
The person who stopped trying. The abandoned effort, the “I don’t care,” the apathy that worries you: that’s rarely laziness. That’s the second outcome: avoidance. If I don’t try, I can’t fall short, and if I can’t fall short, I don’t have to feel the message “I’m not good enough” land one more time. They aren’t refusing to engage. They’re protecting a significance bin that’s already running low, or they’ve given up on getting those messages from the valuable sources in their life and stopped looking.
The lie that seemed unnecessary. Often the lie isn’t about the thing at all; it’s about avoiding disappointment, disapproval, or conflict, or about grabbing a resource the quick way. Wrong tool, real need.
The big reaction to a small thing. When a reaction is far bigger than the moment that sparked it, you’re usually not looking at the moment. You’re looking at a bin that’s been draining for a while, and this was simply one thing more than it could hold.
In our system we teach that the uncomfortable emotions we experience (embarrassment, discouragement, feeling controlled, disappointment, disapproval) funnel down into five main discomforts: fear, stress, anger, guilt, and grief. And the deepest one is grief: the feeling that comes from no longer having something, or from not receiving what we want or need. When you watch someone withdraw, lash out, or hold on to a habit that’s hurting them, you are very often watching grief wearing a disguise.
The Power to Choose
Now for the overriding lesson, the one everything else in this piece hangs on: everything we think, say, or do, and everything we don’t think, say, or do, revolves around garnering positive messages and avoiding negative ones. And the messages themselves are not neutral. When a message is positive, it’s a nutrient: it feeds you and builds you. When it’s negative, it’s poison. Would you knowingly swallow poison? Of course not. Yet we do it every day, in the form of the harmful messages we generate internally, send out, or accept from others.
There are four ways people go after the messages they need: passivity, aggression, passive-aggression, and assertion. The first three are junk food. They deliver something quick, a jolt of satisfaction, a moment of relief, and they seem to work in the moment. But like junk food, they provide no real nourishment and they cause damage, to you and to the people around you. Assertion, calm assertion, is the healthy meal. It’s the only approach that produces fulfillment instead of a quick fix, and it’s the only one that lets you do the most important thing there is: love yourself and others as much as possible, regardless of the scenario or circumstances. Every other approach is a fraudulent fake.
So why do we grab the junk food so often? Because most of our decisions are made quickly, through the subconscious, especially under pressure. We hurry ourselves up, or we allow someone or something to hurry us up, and we react through some form of aggression instead of choosing to be calm and assertive.
Read that last sentence again, because the most important word in it is choosing. Reacting is what happens when you hand your power away. Responding through calm assertion is a choice, and it is a power every single one of us has, in every scenario, no matter the circumstances. People are not helpless passengers of their empty bins. The bins explain the behavior; they never remove the choice. That’s true of the people frustrating you, and it’s true of you.
Meeting the Need Instead of Fighting the Behavior
Here’s where this understanding starts changing outcomes.
When we respond only to the behavior (criticize it, argue with it, try to shut it down), we’re tending to the smoke and leaving the fire alone. Sometimes the behavior pauses, but the unfilled need doesn’t go anywhere. It simply looks for another way to be heard.
When we identify the need underneath and help fill it in a healthy way, the behavior loses its job. It’s no longer needed.
So the next time a behavior doesn’t seem to make sense, in someone you love, someone you work with, or yourself, get curious before drawing conclusions. Ask:
- What might this behavior be trying to get, or trying to avoid? “Nothing” isn’t an answer; behavior is always purposeful.
- Which bin might be low? Significance? Freedom? Connection? Safety? Or one of the many messages that feed them: a sense of control, acceptance, purpose, peace, joy, affection, empathy, feedback, education? If you know the person well and look honestly, you can usually spot it.
- How is that need being fed right now? Do they experience messages like “I’m needed,” “I contributed,” “I can fall short and still be accepted,” and if so, where? Do those messages come from you, or do they have to look elsewhere? Which messages and resources are not being realized enough, or not in the right way?
- What’s one concrete, healthy way to help fill it this week? Real trust extended. A genuine choice offered. Time together with no agenda. Appreciation that isn’t attached to performance. Know what the people within your circle of influence really need, and find ways to fill those needs, or teach, guide, and role-model so they learn to fill them for themselves and from other healthy sources. That last part matters most: the goal is never dependence. It’s capability.
And one clarification, because this is sometimes heard the wrong way: understanding the need does not mean the behavior gets a pass. Honesty still matters. Boundaries stand. In fact, this understanding lets you call out the behavior more directly, not less, with empathy, understanding, and love: “From my perspective, it looks like you’re using this method to try to fill a real need. There’s a better option, especially with me. In the future, here’s what I’d ask you to do or say instead.” Now you’re doing both: holding the standard and filling the bin.
One more dose of reality: you can ask, but people are going to choose their own way regardless. That’s their power to choose, the same one you have. When they choose poorly, your job isn’t to be wounded by it; it’s to accept it, adjust, and keep your own bins filled from healthy sources.
Start With Your Own Bins
This works in the mirror, too. You have resource bins of your own, and when they’re running low, it’s much harder to read anyone else’s messages well. A person running on empty tends to receive every difficult behavior as a threat or an attack. A person whose bins are reasonably full can look at the very same behavior and see it for what it is: information.
So read your own behavior with the same honesty you’d apply to anyone else’s. Your frustration, your agitation, your sneakiness, your ignoring, withdrawing, arguing, avoiding, your habits: those are messages too, pointing at bins that need filling. Don’t beat yourself up over them, and don’t excuse them either. Read them, then use your power to choose something better.
The people in your life are not problems to be managed, and they are not fragile victims of their circumstances. They are capable people going after the messages they need with the tools they have right now, and so are you. Some of those tools are junk food. Every one of us has the power to trade them for something better, starting with the very next thing we think, say, or do.
Every behavior is a message. Start reading, start choosing, and everything begins to change.