Evaluating and Judgment as a Tool
But judgment is important right? How else can we reflect, assess, self-evaluate what’s working, what’s not working. We need to be critical to know how to make things better, improve, develop, grow. Yes, judgment, knowledge, wisdom, insight, experience is important but the complication is when we put a value judgment on what we do or where we are. As in what we did or do has a value of being good or bad. It’s almost impossible to not think this way, but we have to try and separate them.
Maybe the distinction is between judgment and feedback or critique or evaluation. The latter being more of an objective assessment of, if what you’re doing is progressing you to where you want to go. The former being just a vague value statement that creates all sorts of mental baggage with pride and ego at the expense of humility and being able to keep a growth mindset.
If we do something “good” we are forced into mindset of having to always be “good” because nobody wants to be “bad”. But does getting a “good” grade, doing something “good” at your job or working out, staying fit really make you a “good” person? But we make that association all the time, because that’s what we think it means to be “good”. Those types of things are just things we do, that may or may not be working towards some kind of outcome. Or what if we find ourselves frequently being in a state of being “bad”, it’s a value judgment that can have detrimental effects, we can imagine it causing discouragement, lack of motivation, a fixed mindset or even just the stress and low energy of going throughout our daily lives with the thought of being “bad”.