I was talking with my coach earlier this week and expressed how I was angry at myself for getting distracted over the weekend and spending too much time on my computer. The coach suggested there’s never a reason to judge yourself. He argued you can look into the conditions that caused something, try to understand why, learn from it and avoid doing it again all without judgement. From that angry place it certainly felt difficult to imagine a life without self-judgement. Then it felt like a nice fantasy: How nice would it be to calmly learn from things without feeling like you were an obstacle for yourself?
All in all, it was a good statement to get me thinking. Reflecting on this I wonder what is judgement then? Here’s the definition I found from the Oxford Languages dictionary
“the ability to make considered decisions or come to sensible conclusions.”
That sounds so reasonable. By that definition I could do what my coach suggested without what he seemed to mean by judgement. The element that seems more problematic is the frustration or anger that can come along with the sensible conclusions. How I can grit my teeth and feel bad about what I did. So the judgement isn’t the issue as much as the other parts that can come along for the ride. I said I was judging myself but actually my conclusions weren’t sensible, they were full of anger.
He then shared a story from his life I found interesting to illustrate his own experience with this where he’d completed 9 months once as an experiment doing “Radical Acceptance” and never judging anything he did. It sounded intriguing, but again, what does that term actually mean? Here’s a definition from Hopeway:
Radical acceptance is a distress tolerance skill that is designed to keep pain from turning into suffering. ... Radical acceptance is NOT approval, but rather completely and totally accepting with our mind, body and spirit that we cannot currently change the present facts, even if we do not like them.
So there’s a situation that won’t change, it is the past. For me, it was that I spent more time staring at my computer than I wanted to. Then there was the emotions that I called judgement, which didn’t help me learn from what happened but were just making me suffer. What I could learn is that without structure I can spend more time than I wanted on something. So structuring my time with reminders is one useful tool I could implement when useful.
Are you interested in sensible conclusions without anger and frustration at yourself? Let me know how you get there and any tips you find useful!