Welcome back to Consider Yourself Hugged! Click here to listen to Episode 119. OR click YouTube below to watch! (***Disclaimer: I provide these notes as a skeleton for the show - nothing fancy 😄)
Do you ever judge someone else or FEEL judged based on looks, competence, behaviors, etc.? We all do. Today we'll look at 2 hidden reasons for this behavior. I was in San Diego last week at a School Nutrition Industry conference in San Diego. Yesterday morning we were having breakfast, the group that I was there with, and this conversation sparked today's topic.
I was recording, Tacey, the leader of this group. I'm going to be doing some live trainings, and I wanted to record her, do a little interview. So I hit record and she's poofing her hair, you know how we do, "Oh my gosh, do I have raccoon eyes? How does my hair look?" Elaine, another woman was laughing and said, "You know, we do that, don't we? We see people and we judge them. We think we don't judge them, but we kind of do. Like what that person looks like. Oh, what about those clothes, etc?". I’ll come back to this.
Let’s talk about the two reasons behind judging. The first one has to do with comparison. It looks like judging, but what it really is is comparison. Maybe your industry is, cosmetology, or accounting, or whatever it is, and you're interacting with someone who does what you do. And maybe you think that what they do is so much better than you or maybe you think what they do is not as good as what you do. And we're not even consciously aware of it most of the time. So what's happening is called the variable ration schedule or the slot machine approach. It comes from a book called "Self-Esteem" by Dr. Matthew McKay and Patrick Fanning. (Watch for description).
The second one (and they're very much related), comes from my conversation, and she said it in such an interesting way. We were was talking about dress because we had seen a woman earlier who was just dressed so amazingly. She said, yeah, sometimes I'll look at another woman and I'm sort of judging that style. Oh, look at that. You know, is she pulling that off? Does that look okay? Can she wear that? Is too old, too young. But what we're really doing is sizing up if we could pull it off, like how it would look on us. So, it's kind of a comparison, but what she's saying was, in this way of judging slash comparing. It's not to increase our self-esteem or we're not looking for a way to win. We're just wondering how it would apply to us.
Now let's go back to Tacey, the woman I was recording who was saying, oh no, do I have raccoon eyes? Elaine who has this wise thing she's talking about says, you know, people probably do notice like if your hair's messy or if you have raccoon eyes, and they may even have a judgment, but as soon as they hear you talk, as soon as they get to know you, as soon as they interact, all of that goes away. And I thought, that is so interesting. Because most people would have said to no you look great. People are going to notice that. But I love Elaine saying, yeah, they might. But it doesn't matter because that's going to go away quickly. I love the fact that she was self-aware enough to admit, yes, we do get judged and yes we do judge.
So what do you do with that? As with everything that I talk about, the first step is awareness. I guess today just let me give you some food for thought because that's what it did for me.
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And until next time, Consider Yourself Hugged 😘🤗