- Judgements Affect Personal Life: Leo Gura starts the video by highlighting that making judgments about others is equivalent to judging oneself. He elaborates this with multiple examples where, for instance, people who judge fat individuals may feel ashamed or guilty when they gain a little weight. Judgments about others can be internalised and can have negative impacts on a person's feelings and actions.
- Impact on Relationships: Furthermore, Gura discusses how these judgments can negatively affect relationships. If one judges their partner for gaining weight, it can potentially lead to conflict, even break-ups. He also talks about the negative impact of women making judgments about 'hot women,' which can affect their self-image and performance in intimate settings.
- Judging the Rich: Leo also illustrates that those who judge the wealthy could potentially sabotage their financial success due to an ingrained belief that all rich people act in immoral ways. This suggests that our judgments of others can subconsciously influence our life decisions.
- Judgments Become Personal Rules: Gura emphasizes that our judgments become rules that we apply to ourselves. This mechanism occurs because our minds aim to maintain consistency and integrity.
- Judgments and Motivation: For instance, those who are health-conscious and judge overweight people might develop an overzealous fitness routine driven by the fear of becoming 'fat' themselves. As such, their motivation for physical fitness becomes more about avoiding self-judgment than health itself.
- Solution to Stop Judging Oneself: Leo advises viewers to stop judging others, to avoid judging themselves. He suggests an exercise where individuals list all their judgments about others and themselves, encouraging them to identify the judgments that have particularly strong effects on their lives.
- Awareness of Judgments: He emphasizes the need to be mindful of all judgments, even subtle ones or those shared through jokes. This awareness can allow individuals to reflect on how they judge others and identify judgments that might limit them.
- Promotion of Personal Development: Gura promotes his free newsletter, which includes videos on personal development. He suggests that consistent work, over a few years, using the exercises, action steps, and theories he provides can induce significant transformations.
- Importance of Recognizing Our Deep Judgments: Leo demonstrates the importance of recognizing and questioning deep judgments that have been adopted from past experiences. These judgments create constraints in our behavior and can restrict our personal growth and happiness.
- Avoidance of Neglecting Self-Care: He argues that self-imposed rules such as "lazy is bad" can lead to burnout and neglect of self-care. He emphasizes the importance of allowing oneself a break and prioritizing self-care when needed.
- Dangers of Creating Arbitrary Rules: Gura explains that creating restrictive, arbitrary rules can lead to guilt, shame, and dissatisfaction. He uses his own example of being a people-pleaser due to past self-judgments about being inconsiderate, suggesting that such judgments can lead to a pattern of behavior in one's life.
- Final Advice: Leo concludes by urging viewers to take action to minimize self-judgment, he recommends signing up for his newsletter for additional resources on personal development.
- Negative Consequences of Judging Others and Self-Sabotage: When we judge others, we create rigid categories in our minds that don't leave room for nuance. For example, if we view all rich people as immoral, we subconsciously sabotage our own success because our mind doesn't have the category of a "moral rich person." This type of judgment can lead us to let go of potentially successful business ventures.
- Subconscious Impact of Judgments: These judgments often occur on a subconscious level, and we may not be aware that our own self-sabotaging behaviour is the result of judgments made years prior. This is why it's crucial to "connect the dots" and understand where these self-harming perceptions originate from.
- Negativity of Judging Newbies and its Repercussions: An example of such subconscious judgement can be seen when experienced gym-goers ridicule beginners. However, when those experienced gym-goers themselves are beginners at a new activity, say golf, they become self-conscious, fearing they could be judged in the same manner they judged the gym newbies. This fear could cause them to quit their new hobby or opportunity.
- Positive Judgments and Inadequacy: Not all judgments have negative connotations. However, seemingly positive judgments can also lead to negative feelings of inadequacy. Judging someone as charismatic, for instance, might make you feel inadequate if you perceive yourself as failing to match up to those qualities. Again, this is tied to the mind's inherent need to maintain consistency and integrity.
- Judging as Rule Making: The act of judging is like creating a personal rule that the mind applies to all future situations. Whether it's lazily dismissing panhandlers on the streets or working frantically to avoid being seen as lazy, these judgments shape our emotions and actions, often in a harmful, self-destructive manner.
- Rules and Reactions: These created rules not only govern our interactions with others but also how we react when challenged. If we have a rule that being lazy is bad, we might overwork, neglect personal relationships, and overall burn out to avoid being perceived (or perceiving ourselves) as lazy.
- Examples from Personal Relationships: A personal example of this can be seen in the case of someone growing up with a non-affectionate mother. In an attempt to avoid becoming like their mother, they might go overboard trying to be affectionate, causing strain in their relationships and personal life.
- Negative Consequences from Strict Rules and Judgments: Leo Gura discusses that the rules we make for ourselves, often influenced by judgments of others like a woman deciding she'll never be as selfish as her mother, can create problems in life. These rigid laws can lead to self-neglect, deterioration of relationships, and dissatisfaction as life is forced to fit around these arbitrary decisions made from past judgments.
- Neglecting Own Needs in Response to Rules: Following on the previous point, Gura explains that when a person continuously sacrifices their own needs to adhere to these self-imposed rules, their physical and psychological health might suffer. He notes that such rules to 'never be selfish' prevents prioritizing self-care, leading to fatigue, and inability to maintain personal well-being.
- Failure to Recognize the Rules at Play in Our Lives: Gura highlights that often people are unaware of these self-imposed rules and judgments influencing their lives. They experience troubles with family, health, and other aspects of life but fail to trace back these problems to the rules decreed earlier in their lives. It's important to make these subconscious ideas conscious and reconsider their influence.
- Disowning Parts of Reality due to Rigid Rules: Gura reiterates that such rules result in disowning parts of reality, which leads to inflexibility in life. Blocking certain avenues due to past judgments creates guilt, shame, dissatisfaction, and a feeling of self-sabotage. For instance, such rules might disallow someone to take a vacation, be slightly lazy, or become wealthy.
- Personal Insight due to Elders' Judgments: Gura shares a personal insight that he had developed people-pleasing tendencies due to judging his father's inconsiderate behavior in his past. This judgment led to him always trying to be the 'nice one' in interactions with others for decades, affecting his ability to embrace necessary self-interest in life.
- Exercise to Discover Deep Insights and Stop Judging Self: Gura suggests an exercise to help viewers discover their own subconscious judgments. This involves writing every judgment made against others and self. The aim is to form an unfiltered list of both negative and positive judgments, ultimately helping individuals identify judgments that have the potential to create neurotic patterns and backfire in life.
- Exercise Demonstration: Leo demonstrates a five-minute exercise of listing, without any filters, all the judgments he has ever made about himself and others to better understand the negative impacts of his judgments.
- Methods to Stop Judging Others: Leo suggests various methods to stop judging others, including mindfulness of subtle judgments, noticing the damage judgments have on oneself, and understanding that judging others often leads to self-judgment.
- Suggested Exercise: Leo advises viewers to create their own unfiltered lists of judgments about themselves and others, which will heighten their mindfulness on the frequency and impacts of their judgments. He suggests marking the judgments which could potentially backfire as areas to focus on for personal growth.
- Final Thoughts: Concluding the segment, Leo advocates for the viewers' active participation in self-reflection, mindfulness, and his suggested exercises for personal growth. In supporting his work, he endorses his newsletter which offers additional resources and staying engaged with personal development work. He emphasizes the transformative power of consistent and long-term personal development work.