Topic: Observe, Don’t Judge.

Theme: Judgmentalism 

Author: Barry Sweet

Date: January 7, 2018

Video Production by Tim & Karen Morse. Morsephotography.com

ODJ stands for Observe, Don't Judge. The guy passes you on a double yellow. The observation is “Wow, that guy passed me on a double yellow…” The Judgement harsh is “What a jerk”. The Judgement kind is “Wow… he must be on his way to the hospital” or “must be really hungry” or “must not have seen his wife for a week” or “really got to go to the bathroom”. 

You drop the plate in the kitchen and it shatters into the proverbial hundred pieces. The observation is “I just dropped a plate in the kitchen and it broke…”  The judgment harsh is “I'm such a klutz… what a loser…” The judgment kind is “Wow, you know, I don't do that very often…” We can do judgments harsh on others… or kind on others.  We can do Judgements harsh on ourselves… or kind on ourselves or… we can just simply leave it at the observation.

My bride Joan will say “Oh you know what…? I'm really sorry I said that… That guy just passed us on a double yellow”. So she'll actually retract what she said when she jumps into judgment harsh and then do it well by just kicking back into the observation. So she catches herself when she does it. And then she takes it back. So she's become my role, model so that I can learn how to do it better myself. And here's the thing… You can put the period after the observation, or you can put the period after the judgment harsh, or you can put the period after the judgment kind. But what we've been practicing in ODJ. Observe. Don't Judge… is just to put the period after the observation… and leave it at that. We realize that we've become groomed in judging… judging situations, judging people, and… you don't have to actually be that way. You can be different… and to to dial it back to neutrality… is to dial it back to the observation. 

When I was in grad school I had a professor that I just really admired. Her name was Roberta Hestenes. She did the small group dynamics courses for us and she taught us that the best small groups were from 7 people to 12 people (in size). If it's any smaller than 7, you don't get as much dynamism. If it's larger than 7, then it starts to get a little chaotic, and if it is more than 12… It's just too much, too many people. And so she would break us up into groups of eight, and we could go anywhere we wanted. We could go to the park, we could go to somebody's apartment, we could go to the beach, we could go anywhere we wanted, and she'd give us a highly supercharged topic and we all had to (discuss it). Seven people would sit in a circle and the eighth person would sit outside the circle with a pad of paper and a pencil and their title was “Process Observer”. 

And the topics were like abortion and stuff that were just supercharged and people would talk in small group and the Process Observer was just there, not to engage in the dynamism of the conversation but to just simply “write down what they saw” and we talked for an hour and a half… and then the Process Observer would talk for the last half hour and they would say “Wow, I noticed that whenever you talked about Phil's car, Mary, you'd just get really super fidgety…” and come to find out that Phil and Mary had a little interlude in the back seat of that car earlier in the semester. 

He would say “Randy you always pull on your ear whenever you talk about Stan…”  And he and Stan had some problem that they were boxing and joking around and Stan hit him in the ear and he had to go to the hospital after that. So there's these subtle things that would happen in the conversations and the Process Observer would learn that. 

And what we all learned through those semesters in small group dynamics what we all learned was that “Wow… you can just be an observer and not be involved, and learn an entirely whole new set of nuances that go on in conversations. So to practice being an observer, is one of the classic skill sets that we all try to groom and get a little bit better at… just being an observer.  Retracting out… actually sitting outside the circle for a change, rather than being in it. Very important.  

Another piece on the topic of Judgment, is the idea of The Window Judge.  The guy walks past the window and glances in as he goes by… and as he glances in, he sees the man with the raised hand and the cowering woman. 

And he calls the police department for a domestic issue that he thinks that he's seen… When the police come they find that that man would do anything to protect his beloved from being stung by a bee… because he goes into anaphylactic shock… and yet he will even swat a bee out of the air with his hand, so that she wouldn't be stung. 

But yet the Window Judge walks by and makes a quick snap judgment by glancing in a window without understanding the whole picture. 

How often have we been the Window Judge. How often have we been Window Judged. And just knowing and being awake and aware to the idea of Window Judges and Window Judgment, helps us just to be an incrementally, an incremental bit more awake on our journey through earth. And then a last word on Judgment: 

We have Vocal Judgment and Non-Vocal Judgment of others, of ourselves. But let's talk about the one on others for a while. If you've got a good healthy sense of filters between your primordial ooze where your darkest thoughts are about people… and what you're actually going to say. Those filters will filter out the really… the ugly… so that you can have some refined elegance on the things that you finally do say to people. And I think we all know people that don't have a good set of filters in place… 

All sorts of things that are said, that should have been filtered before they were said, that can throw gas on a fire.  And I don't think we have the privilege of just flagrantly throwing gas on fires. In relationship there's not… Hearts aren't made for it...

There’s not enough grace in the world to be able to sustain that kind of poor personal behavior. So… think about your filters. 

That's what we try to do all the time, is we try to think about our filters, make sure that they're in place and that the we're well aware of how we can harm another just with simple words.