Don’t judge so quick – it will do you good
We all must make judgements and decisions everyday of our lives. We judge our own postures in the mirror in the morning, we judge and decide how we get to work, and we judge our working environments constantly. Without judgements, we are not able to make decisions. So, we must judge, however there is a difference to use judgements to make bold decisions, and the judgements towards others that can lead us into quick, wrong impressions about people and even really hurt those around us sometimes. The key therefore is, to use judgement in a sensible way, and find a balance between using it to develop and make decisions, and not be too harsh on others in our evaluations of them.
The question is, how do you find this balance? The first thing that really helps and that allows you to judge and make decisions in the first place, is for you to know what you want. Only when you know what you want, what your values are and what is important to you personally in your life, are you even able to judge and evaluate your surroundings based on those fundamental. This is called active judgement, which will then lead to active decisions making. There is also the path of passive decision making, for people who don’t know what they want and are often undecisive. The problem is, if you don’t decide, life does it for you.
Once you know what you want, you will automatically judge those around you, based on your core values and beliefs. There is however a major difference between judging and making decisions for your own good to develop and progress and using judgement and evaluations towards others. We all naturally judge those around us constantly, but we can do this in a progressive way, or in a very radical way, that will only lead us to stay within our very own bubbles of thoughts and beliefs.
Very important in our approach to judgement of others is time. The wise person does not do quick and uninformed judgements, similar as we would not do those for our own, we also should not do so towards others. We should take our time to form a clear picture on people around us and not only trust in quick judgements and first impressions. We have to take time to get to know a person fully before we can thoroughly judge them.
The second major ingredient here is to stay open minded. The world these days because of narrow minded judgements lives in bubbles. We all live in our own bubbles of opinions, where everyone agrees with us. We need to stay open minded to break out of our bubbles and accept other opinions around us. If we judge quickly and harshly those that might have different opinions, we kill every possibility for open mindedness just there. We must be careful with judgement as it can be a strong weapon, both in a positive and in a negative way.
We judge all the time – but the challenge is to find an equilibrium between using judgement in a progressive way to make decisions and stay open minded towards other around us. Only then, we will benefit from our judgements and decisions in the long term.
