Shed Your Cloak of Judgement
It sure is a heavy cloak. Sometimes you don’t even know you’re lugging it around.
But a really simple way to tell if you’re carrying it is to observe your thinking. Do you have a running commentary about what is happening around you that goes something like this….
You’re driving down the street running an errand. As a fly sitting on the wall in your head, you observe people walking down the street doing their own thing as you do yours and you think to yourself,
“Why are they wearing those shoes with that style of pant – it just doesn’t work. Oh, and why did they put the flower pot on that corner of their porch, it just limits the space that people can get to the front door when they have visitors. Did they even think about how that car breaks down and is such a poor value for the cost? It’s just silly what they paid for that SUV….”
Do you get the picture of what I’m talking about? Your head is filled with run-on sentences that just move from one judgment to another without pausing to answer your own questions. This is what the cloak of judgment looks like in your head.
No one cares what you think, including you. It’s just a mess of opinions that have no relationship to anything that’s important to you – or anyone else for that matter.
So how do you get rid of this energy-sapping thinking? The same way you observed this thinking and then take it one step further to stop yourself in the middle of your jumbled thoughts. You tell yourself that you don’t want to think like this and change the subject to something you do care about and want to think about.
It takes some time to first catch yourself in the act and then stop the run-on thinking. However, it makes a big difference when you do make progress because all the negative, judgy energy is shifted to an energy that you choose.
I remember when I first noticed this kind of thinking in myself, I was taken aback because I never thought of myself as being so judgmental. When I started to catch myself in the judgy loop, I would call myself out using my name “Beth, you don’t think like this anymore” and it was quite effective. By using my own name, it was impossible to ignore my thought patterns. It was almost as if I was back in grade school!
This is a really simple way to make a small shift, yet it has a much bigger impact because it allows you to spend your energy on the kind of thinking that does matter to you. It also is a great way to get to know yourself better.
What better way to start the new year than to get to know yourself a little bit better!