When You Let Your Limiting Beliefs Create Your World…
Too Quick to Judge is a short film that presents a classic example of a person allowing their limiting beliefs to give context to their reality. Watch first, and then read my brief commentary below.
Who was he really judging here, and why?
He was judging his own self-worth, and his own attitudes as “ridiculous.”
Even if the girl hadn’t been deaf, there are plenty of reasons why she may not have responded: she may have been deep in focus, she may have been upset about something else, or she may have been too nervous or shy to talk to him… But he makes the choice to believe that she was choosing to ignore him because she thought he was “a creep that’s trying to get at her.”
He chose to believe that she had rejected him.
Our judgments (especially the ones when we think we know what someone is thinking) show us only how we’re judging ourselves. We aren’t mind-readers, but we often presume we know what other people’s intentions are, what they think of us, and what their attitudes are. Where do we get this information from?
We get this information by assuming that other people are just like us, and then projecting onto them our own thoughts and attitudes relative to each situation. So when he says “You think every guy is after you,” he’s really talking about what he thinks.
It’s useful, when you catch yourself using sentences like these, to turn these sentences around on yourself to learn what you are really thinking. Sometimes reversing the affirmatives and negatives are also revealing. So for example, “You think every guy is after you” could be reversed in the following ways:
- I think every guy is after you.
- I think every (guy/girl) is after me.
- I think no one is after me.
These sentences are each a little different, and he would need to sit with each one for a minute to really feel how much truth each one had. But all of them are more likely to be closer to the truth than when he began the sentence “You think …”, which falsely took the focus away from himself while he deceived himself into believing that her mind works just like his own.
Self-judgments turn into limiting beliefs about people in general, and about how the world works. We live in our minds, and so it’s easy to hastily project what’s in our minds out into the minds of everyone else. But this is self-deception that ultimately causes suffering – not just for yourself, but also for those around you.
Identity Work is about connecting to yourself and being self-honest about the judgments you’re making about yourself, rather than pointing the finger at other people.
With Identity Coaching, one skill you can learn is how to become self-aware enough to see through the mechanics of your own judgments, while at the same time raising your empathy – a skill which suffers when we fall into the judgment trap.
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