A few years ago, I was working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. One day I was returning home from work and I was on the metro-train in the streets of Philadelphia.
At one stop, a man with two young boys entered the train. The two boys were not happy, they were crying. The man sat next to me and there were other people inside the compartment where I was reading some journal article.
Many other people were also reading newspapers, some were busy on the phone, few were listening to music on earbuds, and some were just relaxing with closed eyes after a long day of work.
The train compartment, where I was, was mostly quiet.
The man who sat next to me closed his eyes but the two young boys were extremely active, basically they were in a rowdy mood, crying, running here and there, and they were snatching newspapers from other passengers.
This man didn’t open his eyes.
He acted as if he came alone, there were no boys.
Everybody inside the train compartment was really irritated and confused about what to do.
The whole serene environment inside the train turned rowdy, noisy, and intolerable.
Everybody was looking at each other’s face because the adult man to whom these two boys belonged was still in deep sleep, eyes closed.
I realized everybody was explosive inside with the man.
One lady across my seat whispered, “How irresponsible he is.”
I didn’t say anything but nodded my head to support her.
The scene became chaotic and uncontrollable.
Suddenly, one man across my seat stepped up and shook his shoulders, making him aware that he is with two boys and they are creating a mess for others.
He said to the man, “Your boys are making too many problems, you should be responsible.”
The man replied, “Oh yeah, I should be.”
He added, “I lost myself, I became unconscious, I completely forgot I am with my boys”.
He said, “I am very sorry.”
His voice became brittle and said, “Their mom just died in the hospital, and they wanted to stay with their mom but I brought them home.”
Immediately after that sentence, everything changed inside the train compartment.
The whole scene inside the train changed.
Everyone was shocked.
All the passengers inside the train compartment immediately changed their attitude, behaviour, and perception towards the boys, even though the boys were still in the same rowdy behaviour.
The woman who whispered to me before and said he was irresponsible was torn down.
I saw her moist eyes with tears.
She was trying to touch the boys as if she could cuddle them, I could read the emotion in her face.
I myself turned 180 degrees and became almost unresponsive.
I wanted to hug the man who was next to me but I couldn’t do that.
I couldn’t say anything, I became speechless, I guess I was trying to hide my tears in front of other people. We hide tears, especially men, in public due to deeply ingrained social conditioning and, most importantly, the fear of being perceived as weak.
“We hide tears, especially men, in public due to deeply ingrained social conditioning and, most importantly, the fear of being perceived as weak.”
I remember my father who told me that emotions are fine in weddings and funerals but not in other places.
But I was unable to hide my emotion, my tears, inside the train.
Emotions play a role in every part of our life but it’s up to us how we control them. In the book ‘How Emotions Are Made’ the author and neuroscientist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD, says “You aren’t at the mercy of your emotions, your brain creates them.” I also recommend watching her inspiring TedTalk with the same title.
During this emotional mess, I got out of the train in my station and drove home from the train station parking lot.
My mind was full of those two boys’ pictures.
I even shared this experience with my wife at home.
I became so curious how this small squishy mass, the brain, inside the skull works.
Why do we become so judgemental?
Why do we become so unconscious?
Why does this squishy organ inside the skull behave so erratically?
Why does it allow us to change our mood, thinking, and perception abruptly?
I was judging somebody fiercely a few minutes ago but immediately after knowing the fact I was regretting.
It’s not only one time that I judged one particular person, but how could I be completely non-judgemental all time?
Being judgemental is an unconscious human habit created from a raw mind, it is deeply seated in the human psyche.
We struggle to improve this habit because our brain works so quickly without giving us time for a second thought.
In majority cases, often the thoughts we perceive exist in negative ways in our mind.
Only constructive and positive beliefs influence what we think or choose not to think.
Our judgemental practice runs on auto-pilot, entering into the subconscious level, if we don’t work on improving it.
We don’t become non-judgemental by any motivation, it happens only by mental clarity.
Carl Jung, the author of ‘The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’ says “We must be aware of the shift of unconscious habit to conscious habit to succeed.”
“We don’t become non-judgemental by any motivation, it happens only by mental clarity.”
Our brain is designed to be unique.
Each of us is created or born uniquely.
We have different capacities and understandings, we are given different choices with various outcomes possible.
The way we think is also our choice.
There are a lot of things we can choose in our life.
We can choose one glass of wine or five glasses of wine tonight.
We can choose one cup of tea or five cups of tea in a day.
We can choose to go running outside or sit and watch the 10th season of friends on Netflix.
And, most importantly, we can choose anything irrespective of the type of mind we possess.
Choice is the result of our brain action.
Thoughts are also the same, we can think positively or negatively based on our choices.
I recall David Hawkins’s words, an internationally renowned spiritual author and psychiatrist, in his book ‘Transcending the levels of consciousness’: “My mind is like a sponge, it has absorbed all the information, but I’m still in the same place.”
The human mind is incapable of segregating judgements and biases from truths even though we all are aware of it.
We have to work and practice consistently in our mind to achieve this goal.
“David Hawkins: My mind is like a sponge, it has absorbed all the information, but I’m still in the same place.”
Though we have a unique mind but in case of judgement, why do we respond in the same way?
We all perceive various things in various ways and thus live in various structures.
But why do we all have the same judgement in situations like that I experienced on the train?
What exactly happens to our mind when we start to judge others?
When I heard the sentence, “Their mom died today;” my judgemental mind turned into the opposite direction.
Not only mine, all passenger’s minds in the train did the same.
I started to see the world of those two small boys in very different ways than the normal boys who have their mom with them.
The important pattern that I recognized is when the boys were creating problems, I became vulnerable to my own fixed judgemental mindset.
I became a victim of my own rooted perception.
My fixed mindset only blamed the dad of the two boys.
Dr Carol Dweck, PhD, psychologist and author of ‘Mindset’ says that before we shift to a fixed mindset in any scenario, we should give some room in our mind to wiggle, so that we don’t turn into fixed ready-made thoughts.
Actually we could alter our judgemental mindset but we couldn’t do that because we weren’t trained to do so.
Strong will, patience, and power to ask why to the mind, are essential to shift into a room of non-judgemental mindset.
I learned the lesson: quick reaction to our existing perception doesn’t do good.
I need a non-judgemental mindset for a positive change in my life. In Daniel Kahneman’s book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, this kind of problem is defined as the clash between system one thinking which is fast, automatic, and emotional and system two thinking which is slow, deliberate, and logical.
The key in such a situation, I learned, is to wait before to make our preconceived ill notion public.
I should not try to hurry things along with my existing beliefs.
We have a tendency to focus on what we don’t have and what we don’t see.
We don’t focus more on what we have and what we see.
This is one of the main reasons that we quickly judge others.
If we start to focus on what we have and what we see, the whole world changes for us.
We will move towards the zone of non-judgemental arena.
“We have a tendency to focus on what we don’t have and what we don’t see, that makes us judgmental.”
When I was next to those boys’ dad, I didn’t ask anything to him, I was only thinking what’s wrong with this man.
Many times we don’t ask questions, we simply prepare our answers.
Many times we don’t listen, we only wait to respond.
During the whole train ride, I wasn’t ready to ask the question, I wasn’t ready to listen to him, I was only thinking: Why was this man so irresponsible?
Malcolm Gladwell, the author of ‘Blink’ says that human judgements are so vicious that they are key causes in polarizing relationships with other humans.’ Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about our choices that seem to be made in an instant, in the blink of an eye but that actually aren’t as simple as they look. I recommend to watch his Ted Talk ‘Choice, happiness and spaghetti sauce’
In Warren Buffett’s biography ‘The Snowball’ authored by Alice Schroeder, Buffett says “You really shouldn’t ask other people their opinion about anything in life. You ought to have your own reasons for doing your thing. You should make your own judgments on actions”. I believe it applies to everywhere in life, not only in business life. Let’s work together to empower human relationships by being non-judgemental as much as possible.
Conclusion
We hide tears, especially men, in public due to deeply ingrained social conditioning and, most importantly, the fear of being perceived as a weak person. We don’t become non-judgemental by any motivational force, it happens only by mental clarity. David Hawkins, a spiritual leader, puts in the best way of a human mind’s weakness to segregate information, “My mind is like a sponge, it has absorbed all the information, but I’m still in the same place.”
One key human weakness is we have a tendency to focus on what we don’t have and what we don’t see, that makes us more judgemental.
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.”
