When have you felt judged?

Expectations  

Given that this Make it Better (MiB) Table occurred the week after the Social Impact Leadership Australia Table, the MiB Team returned to the older model of using a similar theme and question over recurring weeks. The challenging question was turned around from the previous week’s When is it alright to judge?  to When have you felt judged? The team was keen to see how this would play out with a full table mostly populated by regular attendees, and whether there was a significant difference to the content of the conversation from the previous week.  

Experience 

The opening rituals were observed, with Col reflecting on the difference between Indigenous people who often sought to ‘act with’ the land rather than to ‘act upon’ the land. The rules were explained by various attendees and new people were introduced. 

This table was at times both deeply vulnerable and feisty! Col set a simple qualifier by asking people to begin their comments via a personal story of being judged. 

One attendee opened the proceedings by talking about posting a piece online in the past 24 hours and, while receiving mostly positive responses, focusing on one quite personal piece of commentary that was eliciting raw emotions in terms of feeling judged. This response was compounded by the fact that it was public judgement from someone making assumptions about her as person and her profession. “I’m feeling misunderstood with people making a whole stack of comments about me that aren’t true.” 

Trying to be nuanced in an increasingly polarised community could often lead to being judged, as one attendee shared. She had experienced judgement from an anti-vaxxer family member as she had received COVID-19 vaccines and had also been judged by others when she questioned the role of ‘big pharma’ during the vaccine rollout.  

The was the theme that generated the most heat at the MiB Table was around the question of whether there are ‘moral absolutes’ that, when broken, should people be judged? This led to an energetic conversation about whether we could judge other cultures, or people from other times, for their actions that we felt transgressed moral absolutes. “Moral facts,” one attendee argued, “compel us to judge.” If we are in the presence of evil, for example, shouldn’t we judge that? And shouldn’t we be judged if we are perpetrating that? 

Another attendee also pointed out that the worst judge of us...is us. And that we judged ourselves for much less than we judged others.  

Having our own echo chambers, which often protect us from being judged by our peers as we stayed within our own tribe with its shared values, also meant that we were tempted to judge others whose opinions and lives deviated from ours. “I spend a lot of time with people like me. When I’m challenged, I can often dismiss people because they’re different to me,” one attendee offered. “What does it look like,” he reflected, “to ask questions and be curious about others?” 

One piece of advice about how to respond to the judgements we make with action resonated with the attendees at the end of the conversation. “There’s god’s business, other people’s business and my business – and if it’s my business, then I can make a judgement about how to try and change that particular issue.” 

Outcomes 

While the outcomes were harder to pin down, people left expressing that they were examining how the judged people and what drove them to judge. There was also an affirmation that judgement (which we do daily to determine whether it is safe to cross a road, for example) was not an issue. What was problematic was what an individual did with that judgement. From an MiB Team perspective, we again wrestled with what the ideal number for a MiB Table was – did a full table lay the best foundation for conversations that were slow and inclusive of everyone at the Table? 

The attendee who was raw and hurting at the start of the conversation shared that she was feeling much better by the end of it! 

This full table – yet another one for 2023 – was also an indication that the decision to go to monthly tables had been successful, regardless of whatever tweaking to what a ‘full’ table looked like to generate a good conversation.