29 Nov 2021 · 4 min
Brendon Burchard argues that judgments—automatic labels we apply to ourselves and others—shape our reality and limit our lives. Awareness is the first step: notice the judgments you make, slow down your reaction to them, and examine where they come from. When enough people do this, he says, we can dismantle racism and move forward together.
Chapters
Root out the judgmental thoughts that you have. Root them out. What does that mean? It means identify the judgments that you have about yourself and others. Get in there. Get aware right now. Right, Some of you all, when you talk about judgments, you know, you judge yourself too harshly. Some of you are awful to yourselves. And I say that with love, but you're awful to yourself. You talk down to yourself, you mess up and it shuts you down for three days. Because what you say to yourself. Our judgments shape the quality of our lives. Being unaware of them doesn't work well. So notice I said two things. Judgment of self and judgment of others. Personal change. Remember, the first gate of personal change is awareness. Awareness, being aware of our judgments of ourselves and others. How does that show up? It is the thing that you say that defines or explains a judgment. It defines or explains, oh, well, that sibling, she's the one who. And then you define it. Give her a label. Oh, you know, that person on the team, every time they do this, they do it because these reasons and you explain the reasons. Those are judgments. Definitions and explanations are judgments. How do you define yourself? There's judgments there, aren't there? For those who are in a significant relationship, you have a partner, lover, spouse, wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, other. What judgments have you made against them that aren't fair? I keep bringing up problems. It's hard to improve our lives unless we get super aware of the judgments we've made about other people. If we want to change society too, we better get really aware of that. You know, we gotta get really aware of these judgments about other people. And not just. We gotta get really, really, really aware about judgments we've made about other people. You know, you judge a hair. I like a shirt. I don't like a shirt. He's funny. He's not. He's this, he's that. It's so automatic. It's so automatic. But the better you get at slowing down that automaticity, the more conscious you become. Because stimulus, response, most response is judgment. A lot of people understand that stimulus judgment is more accurate because Right response is second. Right. That's the process of information comes in. We interpret, we take our interpretations and we filter it now through our identity. So I'm asking you examine your own mind, your own bias, your own interpretation, ladder your own judgments against yourself and with other people. The better we get as a society of not immediately judging people and examining our ladder of interpretation where it came from, the faster we will root out racism. But without that process, we don't have hope and we'll remember that truth. We all walk difficult paths. That the human story is always a story of struggle and a story of progress. Some have it easier than others, but at the same rate, everyone has struggle and everybody hopes for progress.