One Idea: Judgment vs. Curiosity
If you've ever felt your jaw tighten while talking to a team member, a leader, or honestly anyone in your life, this one is for you.
Last week we focused on leading ourselves: checking in on how we feel, how we want to feel, and what we need to do to feel better. (Catch up on that issue here.) Every second week of the month, we shift the lens outward to leading others. Today's focus: one of the biggest, sneakiest blockers to good communication and creative problem solving. Judgment.
"Wait a moment," you might say. "Good judgment is exactly what makes me a strong leader. How could this be working against me?"
Fair pushback, so let's separate two things that get lumped together. Critical thinking is a powerful skill. It consists of gathering information, assessing the data, and staying open to more. Judgment is when we make a verdict. We see a pattern, "this looks like a 6," and we lock in. We stop being curious. We close off, often before we've properly checked our facts.
We do this because it feels safe. A quick verdict resolves uncertainty fast, and our nervous system loves that. But safe isn't always the same as accurate.
Judgment is a helpful tool. But not a master.
On a team, being run by the autopilot of the judgment gets expensive. It narrows creative problem solving, erodes trust, stalls collaboration, and quietly drains the motivation of the people you lead. (Want the fuller picture of what judgment does to your body, your team, and your options? I put together a short guide, view it here).
This week's practice: Open mind
This one asks you to flex self-awareness and self-regulation muscles first, in other words, the leading-yourself muscles from last week, and then apply them while relating to someone else. That order matters. You can't offer someone else curiosity you haven't first offered yourself first.
Here's how it showed up for me this week.
I'd spent three days fighting a technical bug: my bank wouldn't link to another bank so I could transfer funds. On day three, after an hour retrying every fix the AI support bot suggested, I asked for a human. The human sent back what read like another canned, AI-flavored answer, and I felt my blood start to simmer. An hour of my time, the same frustrating answers, and now I was building a story about how this person doesn't care, and that they're not even trying to understand the issue.
I had a reply half-typed and when I typed the exclamation point, I caught myself.
"Wow, I'm really frustrated and tense. I feel the time pressure and this is taking far longer than it should. That's disappointing. And snapping at a support rep isn't how I want to treat people, and feeling this tension and frustration is not how I want to feel." A few deep breaths. Then: "I'm judging this rep as not caring. What would actually help them get present with me, so we solve this faster?"
More breaths. Then I typed something closer to: "Thank you for working through this with me. I've tried every step you and the bot suggested, more than once, with no result. I don't see any options left on my end. What else are you seeing on yours that might be getting in the way?"
That's when I got an answer that finally sounded human, together with an apology that a known bug was affecting several users and blocking the two banks from communicating. They were already working on it.
I still don't fully know if a person or a bot wrote that reply, there was just enough imperfect phrasing to make me guess human, but the exchange ended there instead of looping through more frustrating dead-end steps. I felt a sense of relief, asked them to flag known bugs earlier next time, and made a mental note to self to ask for a human sooner.
Small resolution. Felt relief from frustration. And experienced a faster, calmer and cleaner conversation than the one judgment was about to have through me.
Your turn. Next time you feel the pressure rising, mid-message with a string of "!!" or "?!" forming, or just a tightness in your chest, stop. Take a few slow belly breaths, try square breathing, or step away for a sip of cold water. Then ask: how else could I look at this? What would it sound like to meet this with curiosity instead of a verdict?
Maybe it sounds like: "I see this differently than you do. Help me understand what you're seeing that I'm not. I want us to find a way together to resolve this."
What's your mini-experiment this week, practicing shifting one judgment into at least one curious question? Reply and tell me, or send me a situation you're finding hard to stay calm and clear-headed in. I read every reply, and I may (anonymously) feature yours in a future issue. Accountability tends to make follow-through far more likely than going it alone, so don't skip this part.
See you next week, when we get into navigating difficult conversations.
With care and appreciation for your inner work,
Lucie
Founder of (& a practitioner in) MindFittery
Mental and Emotional Fitness Gym for Leaders
P.S. Speaking of accountability: I facilitate a weekly Inner Fitness Circle, a place to practice self-leadership and other-leadership skills. Mental and emotional fitness is a lifelong practice, same as physical fitness. Want to sit in on a sample circle as my guest? Just reply and I'll send you details.
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