The Trouble With Being A Judge Of The Supreme Court Of The World

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“When it comes to our own mistakes, we are expert defense lawyers; for the mistakes of others, we become judges on the Supreme Court”

So I saw this on someone’s wall and I was completely “disturbed”. It felt like someone just poured cold water on my face on a strong windy harmattan morning. The statement tore right through me. The other day that “yeye” housemaid of mine spilled palm oil all over the kitchen counter. I was so mad. “Does she know how much it costs?” “Why does she always do this” I really “gave” it to her, except that just a couple of days later, I mistakenly spilled banga soup all over the new white table cover! But hey, I excused myself, after all I didn’t do it purposely. Then just this morning, as always, I was running late, hurrying and rushing all around the house, wondering to myself why I just couldn’t seem to get things right? To top it all I found out that my husband had forgotten to fill up the petrol tank of the car yesterday and that made me mad. Stopping at the filling station was really a big deal. Why? Oh why? I was so determined to “talk” to him about it later today. Yeah! Until I saw this statement and guess what it’s all so true!!

We are often quick to judge both ourselves and others. It is positive and necessary to have opinions. It is also fundamental to our survival for us to sometimes be judgmental, especially as women; we are gifted with what some people call feminine intuition. So being judgmental is not always a bad thing. We need to judge when there is danger, for example a complete stranger being all too friendly to your kids; that person may not have any sinister motives, but the world we find ourselves in makes it imperative that we’re weary of such people. This is not exactly bad. It may make a difference in a life or death situation. However, when we are judgmental in other contexts, we may be doing ourselves and those around us a disservice.

Being judgmental usually involves jumping to conclusions and formulating opinions which are based on limited information and are not representative of the entire situation. For example, a friend may describe a behaviour and you draw conclusions about the person as a whole. Your judgement is based upon this isolated behaviour without consideration of other, potentially important circumstances.

[one_fourth last=”no”]The judgments we form about ourselves, many times have the ability to cripple our productiveness, resulting in low self-esteem.[/one_fourth]

 

Unfortunately, as women we have the tendencies to make ourselves the focus of this habit. An example of destructive self judgement is when you experience difficulty with a particular task and draw the unhelpful conclusion that you are globally “hopeless” as a consequence of struggling with one task. This will undoubtedly have a negative impact upon self-esteem.

 

Clearly, forming conclusions about yourself and others, based upon a small premise derived from a percentage of the facts, can be detrimental. In fact, it could be argued that judgments are usually based on insufficient facts because we often lack insight into all of our own thoughts and feelings and rarely do we fully understand others’ stories. So many of the conclusions we make might not be based on full evidence.They will not stand up in a court of law, so please, let’s try to reduce the hasty judgments we make based on limited facts.

Beofre you form a conclusion, be sure you have all the necessary facts.