Over the past couple of weeks, I have been tracking my unhelpful judgements.
It’s been interesting, and sometimes eye-opening, experience. It’s helped me identify bias, and shine a light on areas where I know I have an opportunity to live a better life.
Two items of particular interest I thought would be worth sharing:
First, my bias/judgements tend to come in two flavors:
- Ones where I position myself as somehow superior to others (“Patrick is an idiot.”).
- Those where I position myself as inferior to others (“Tim has a better life than I do”).
Both come from a place of comparison, where I let ego rule rather than just being “me”.
Second, and I believe this one is more important—once I started noticing my judgements, they started to tail off quite quickly.
At first, I found myself judging a lot and frequently writing them down.
But as I started the practice, I found myself judging less and less over time, and feeling much more centered and comfortable with my place in the world as I did so.
We are all “right here” because we have managed to succeed long enough to get to this place.
And right here is neither “good” nor “bad”.
Adding complexity to our lives by making unhelpful judgements only negates what we have accomplished.
It’s challenging to take a closer peek at our own judgements, but I have found the exercise to be quite useful.
What about you—are you willing to look at your judgements to see where your bias may be holding you back?
