How to Think Less Judgmentally

“But That’s HARD!!”

Our best clients say this (or something more colorful) when they get what we’re asking them to do. They thought they were (simply) signing up for leadership development, or facilitation training, or asking us to help them to navigate a particularly difficult conversation. They thought they understood what we meant when we said “To use this approach, you need to change the way you think, not just the way you act.”

The surprise comes when our clients realize that they are much more judgmental than they would like. They simultaneously realize how much better things would be if they became less judgmental, and how hard it would be for them to do that.

A quick example: Marc is discussing a challenging conversation he had with a colleague. He notices, with his peers’ help, that he was privately concluding that “this guy isn’t a good listener.” Marc also notices that every time his colleague disagreed with him, Marc took that as supporting evidence for his initial conclusion. Marc realizes that he was making an unnecessarily judgmental assumption about his colleague, and that he was seeking data that confirmed it. All this made it much harder for his colleague to do the very thing Marc wanted him to do!

Here’s the three-step process we use to help our clients think less judgmentally:

1. Identify the assumption you are making:This might be “this meeting is going nowhere,” or “she’s off topic – AGAIN!” or Marc’s “this guy isn’t a good listener.” Writing your thoughts down is a great way to get at this information.
2. Find out why you made it:Specifically, ask yourself: “What did the person say or do that led me to this conclusion?” For longstanding issues, you will probably have lots of data. Ask yourself this question as many times as you have to in order to feel that you’ve got all the relevant behavioral data. This data is critical to gather and examine, because the next step is to…
3. Make an assumption more closely linked with the data:What would someone neutral say is going on? In Marc’s case, they might say “Most of the time I express my opinion, my colleague seems not to acknowledge it.”
   Notice that the end result is an assumption that:
   – Doesn’t impugn his colleague’s character or motives
   – Contains an acknowledgement that it might be off base in some way (“seems to”) 

   The benefit – if he’s genuine in his intent – is that Marc could say this out loud, and test with his colleague directly. He’d probably make his colleague defensive if he did this with his “old” assumption.

   The challenge, our clients discover, is to do all of this in the heat of the moment.

   One of our clients felt this ability to be less judgmental was one of the most valuable things we offered, because:

   1. It left the people and groups he worked with highly motivated to make positive personal change.
   2. It also left them more open to the possibility that they had personally contributed to their challenges with others.

   Originally published June 2006