Do you tend to judge?

I would say I’m a quite observant person, I can pick up things that some people may not even be aware of. .....but if I’m honest I did tend to judge a lot, not always in a bad way but more so making an assumption which I guess was followed by a judgement. Think it's something that we all do to an extent, as we have already programmed in us a set of beliefs and opinions which we sometimes don’t even realise – and this often leads to us judging.  For example we may think that someone is better than us or that we are better than them, very rarely do we realise that we should actually be seen equal with everybody otherwise we are either putting others or ourselves down, which is not fair.  

So I remember reading a story and it truly totally changed my way of thinking with regards to judging a situation.  

A man was on the train with his children and they were going wild, running up and down and making a lot of noise. The father of the children didn’t seem to be doing anything to control them - he wasn’t really acknowledging how much noise and disruption they were making. 

There was a man sitting nearby on the train and he was not very happy with all the noise the children were making, he was very surprised to see that the father of the children wasn’t doing anything about it either.  After a while the man on the train couldn’t bear it anymore and said. ‘Excuse me, aren’t you going to do anything about all this noise your kids are making....it’s ridiculous!’ The father of the children replied. ‘Yes you’re right, I probably should but they’re mother has just died so I’m not even sure what to say to them right now’ 

The passenger was in disbelief and felt very bad, he didn’t know how to respond to what he had just heard. 


Initially the passenger on the train could have been thinking was that the man with the children was a bad father,  that the children had no manners and who knows what else. But after hearing the real truth he realised he was wrong.

This story really made me think - we often witness scenarios and situations and we make judgements but little do we know the background information... sometimes we could be right but sometimes we are way off.  Imagine, if the father of the children was in a different frame of mind, this scenario could have got way out of hand and escalated into something a lot bigger.  

After hearing this story it’s encouraged me to observe thing more as opposed to observing then making a judgement. Trying to apply it in my my working life, relationships and even strangers, can be quite difficult.

I’m realising that the mind is quite something...it’s quite difficult to detach from certain opinions and beliefs, that I have programmed in my head, but through repetition it is indeed possible. 

Let's try and judge less and observe more.