Exiling the Judge


The listening game is a great opportunity to practice shutting off your judgments . But now it is time to look at how one actually exits the judgment mode and enters the place of staying focused on the present. Ironically, this process calls for more meta-level work rather than less. To gain control of your judgment usually involves judging yourself to be too judgmental. You must keep your eye on your habitual judgments.

Most people underestimate the pervasiveness of their tendency to judge. They fail to realize that inside most of their chatter is a pattern of extending object-level facts into meta-level generalizations of one sort or another.

A client named Wayne came to me about problems he was experiencing in balancing his goal orientation with his belief that the here and now is the place to be. ˜˜Doesnt goal orientation constantly call for judgment and wishing for something that is not here and now? he asked. ˜˜Isnt that in conflict with the experience of the here and now? How do I reconcile these conflicting motivations?

Wayne was quite stressed about his conflict. In the daytime he would operate very effectively as a capitalist: chasing goals, making decisions about people, and gaining a reputation as a powerful negotiator . At night he would try to live in the present: spending time with his spiritually inclined wife, listening to classical music, and working in his greenhouse tending to his prize-winning roses. He believed that his off-hours lifestyle was far superior to his business hours, but that, for practical reasons, it was not possible for him to incorporate its values into his professional world. Mindfulness, he thought, was in conflict with pursuing success with verve.

I called on a Buddhist principle to help him. I have heard it referred to as ˜˜hold both. The idea is that the two lives of this client were not mutually exclusive. They were only in conflict in his mind. Calling on this principle, I asked him, ˜˜When you work in your garden, do you have a vision of how you want it to look?

˜˜Yes, he said. ˜˜Then are you not being goal oriented even while in your garden? ˜˜Well, I suppose I am. ˜˜And when you see a weed in your garden, do you pluck it out? ˜˜Yes. I see your point. They are not as different as they appear. ˜˜Perhaps what you are feeling is not so much that the two philosophies are different, but that at work you go so fast that you lose sight of the present. Perhaps you are a little quicker at judging somebody to be a weed that needs to be plucked. Maybe when you negotiate you are a little more one-sided than you actually care to be.

Wayne and I planned to put it to the test. He was to keep a detailed diary over a one-week period. After each business meeting, he would enter into his diary a general overview of what was discussed at the meeting. Then he would go into detail about the kinds of judgments he made during the meeting. We arranged to talk every day of that week. We would review his diary entries and talk about patterns we observed . We would speak for about ten minutes at 10:00 .­., 2:00 P.M., and 5:00 P.M. each day. The goal was to get to the bottom of his concern about how his behavior at work was in conflict with his values.

Here is one of our telephone dialogues : ˜˜I just got out of a meeting with my IT guy, Wayne told me. ˜˜He was reviewing how the recent crashes of our credit cardprocessing function were the fault of the installation team and how they were working to diagnose the problems and get them fixed.

˜˜And what were you thinking at the time about this guy? ˜˜Well, thats the famous six million dollar question, isnt it? I was thinking this guy was full of crap. He was the one responsible for the installation team, and he was making it sound like it was not his fault. I have had problems with him before. He tends to get himself into a mess and never owns the mess or gets a sense of closure. Its like he never actually gets complete control over his function. I hate it. To be honest with you, I was visualizing his departure while we were in the middle of the discussion. And this is my point. I would not call that ˜here and now behavior on my part, and this is a perfect example of my issue. I have judged this man to be unsatisfactory for my organization and have decided its time to pull the plug. On the other hand, I dont feel particularly proud of my compassion level. In fact, I see no room for compassion.

˜˜I guess the question is whether you have sufficient data to reach this conclusion. It sounds like youre frustrated and you see this mess as a part of a pattern. Tell me, have you ever talked to him about how he seems to deflect blame and never quite gets closure?

˜˜Not in any formal sense. The lack of closure was never a topic of conversation per se, but I have said before that I wanted closure on certain issues.

˜˜Well, before you blow him out the door, it would be good to have that conversation with him. Meanwhile, I think weve got some interesting things to talk about in our next face-to-face. Ive made some pretty detailed notes tracking what you just told me. Why dont we meet tomorrow?

Our meeting was the perfect opportunity for me to show him how he had simply lost control of his judgments. By the time we got together, he was relatively calm again. In fact, he said he was no longer necessarily going to remove the IT man from his position. His intention was to have some fairly clear discussions with him about a need for greater closure. His shift in mood was going to be instructive for him.

I listed for him the six judgments he had made during his frustrating talk with his employee the day before:

  1. This guy is full of crap.

  2. He is making it sound like it was not his fault.

  3. He tends to get himself into a mess.

  4. He never owns the mess.

  5. He never offers a sense of closure.

  6. He never actually gets complete control over his function.

I asked him which of the six judgments were factual and objective. We argued for a while, in a friendly kind of way, ultimately concluding that none of them was particularly fair. For example, we squabbled over the truth of the statement, ˜˜He never actually gets complete control over his function. That statement was true in the literal sense, but implicit in it was the claim that he ˜˜ought to get complete control. Wayne was willing to concede that this probably was not fair.

In fact, a week later he admitted to me that, as a result of further internal dialogues, he determined that the nature of the application of information technology in his organizationthey were always using one leading-edge technology or anotherwas such that closure and control were not realistic expectations.

Wayne had a good question for me the next time we got together. ˜˜So how do you actually justify going on intuition and moving somebody out when your gut tells you that its the right thing to do?

˜˜I guess you let the facts speak to you, I replied. ˜˜You watch your assumptions to make sure they are based on facts. And you make a call, the same way that you do in your garden. Im sure there are moments when you conclude to yourself, standing alone in your greenhouse, that a particular bush needs to be transplanted because you need space or something. You dont conclude this with some uptight perspective. You know, given your goals for the greenhouse, what you want to do, and you do it. Its a matter of being centered, not anxious. Lets face it, when it comes to that IT guy, you were just angry because when the system is down, it costs you money. The anger affected your clarity.

Wayne had lots of work to do in order to master his ability to manage his judgments. We had to look at what provoked his ego on the job. He had to work through some feelings. Over time he got closer and closer to personal mastery so that he was more or less the same man at work and at home.




Face It. Recognizing and Conquering The Hidden Fear That Drives All Conflict At Work
Face It. Recognizing and Conquering The Hidden Fear That Drives All Conflict At Work
ISBN: 814408354
EAN: N/A
Year: 2002
Pages: 134

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