Have you judged anyone lately? Um, like maybe this week? Me? Guilty. I am guessing I’m not alone.
Where does this come from? I’m no psychologist, just my personal thoughts. For me, it may have been an insecurity belief created when I was young due to my being the youngest of 3 with super smart siblings much older than me. Often, I felt I was always wrong. So, I had a deep-seated need to be right. I also may have developed a legalistic mindset that I’m working on letting go of even now. After all, if God gives me grace, I should be better at giving it to others. Yikes. I’ve got issues, but at least I’m aware of some of them and working on them.
OK, for transparency. I was a bit frustrated with the young people on the beaches in Florida. Then, it bothered me the officials were not closing those beaches. We expect kids to often be rebellious. Then, officials were not allowing cruise ships into port; and people were dying. What? Judging.
More recently I was upset with some churches in the news that were continuing to gather and blaming the government for not allowing them to gather, saying that the government had no right to tell them what to do. What? They didn’t say you couldn’t worship God; they said you shouldn’t gather. (OK, forgive my transparent thought and comedy-trained brain for a second. Later, they will wonder why collections are down and people are home sick or worse! Augh.)
I thought I was doing pretty well with my stress level. Then, I had an Amex payment to my Ad Agency declined after a series of payments that went through properly. After declining a payment, they sent me a text asking if it was legit! What? I approved, it and you declined anyway? So, I called. I asked for a supervisor and then for the supervisor’s supervisor. Business is tough enough right now without legitimate purchases disrupting business. I guess I had some pent-up stress. Though I was respectful to the person I spoke to, letting them know I know they didn’t make the policy; but I was still not very nice. (I was not acting like Jesus would; that is for sure.) Yikes. My bad.
I remember listening to T. Harv Eker speaking once; and he asked, “Do you want to be right or happy?” What? That question made me think. I needed to be reminded of it, especially these past few weeks.
It’s easy to forget we don’t have all the facts when we see a story on the news. In the news we see like 90 seconds of a story. We don’t know all the facts. We don’t have the whole story behind what we saw. There is often a bias as well. If we can’t tell a powerful story in a few minutes, what makes us think we have the whole story in seconds? I have to be careful that I don’t get caught up in the emotion of stories without all of the facts and the perspective of the person that the story is about. If we had their perspective, we might just make the same choice.
Being informed is one thing; but when it gets us upset and takes us out, that is on us. We are the CEOs of our lives. We determine what input we receive and how we process it.
Catch yourself. Please. Then, choose to focus on good.
If we are upset, do we choose to feed the frustration or do something productive with that energy? I’m amazed and inspired seeing the stories of the people and companies who choose to use their skills, talent and creativity to help people. Companies retooling, trainers offering workouts online for free, singers and musicians joining together on Zoom, celebrities using their influence to get the message across to take this seriously. Be creative.
What do you have? What can you offer? How can you help?
- I still don’t understand why the local news has traffic reports right up front…lol.
What do you take from this?
