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hey this is Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to talk about how to stop judging yourself and I'm going to show you a powerful exercise to help you do exactly this I feel a bit of a cold coming on so bear with me as I try to push through it anyways on to the main topic judgments judgments judgments judgments the problem with judgments is that judgments are poisoning your life and as usual which should now be becoming an apparent theme through all the actualized auteur content is that you're usually not aware of how this mechanism works you're not aware of how judgments backfire on you how when you judge others in a sense you're also judging yourself at the same time and in fact that's the profound insight that I want to hammer home at you today is just this one simple idea that judgments that you make about others always apply to you and it doesn't seem this way at first so what I want to do is I want to illustrate this point with assortment of examples common examples that I think that a lot of us have run into but the idea is very simple every time you make a judgment about somebody else their physical appearance or their behavior or their belief systems or anything else you're basically also judging yourself at the same time and you're making life for you very difficult in the future so how does this work well let's take example number one which is judging fat people maybe you're one of these people that actually values his or her health and so you go to the gym and you work out and eat healthy okay but then you judge fat people as they're walking down the street maybe you see a really obese person you're like oh man that's just a fat slob right there and made even sometimes you and your friends kind of laugh at this fat person because you are all into fitness stuff and you're all into eating healthy and go to the gym and working out real hard okay fair enough but here's the problem with this you might wonder well Leo how does this backfire on me I mean I'm fit I have a good well toned body and I take care of my health so it's not backfiring on me right I mean I'm vigilant about my health except it does backfire on you let's just take one example let's say you go to your parents over the holidays and you go to visit them for Thanksgiving and Christmas and it's a big feast and everyone's eating over there and stuff like that right turkey mashed potatoes everything the whole works so what happens well you start to indulge that a little bit you fall off your healthy diet for a while and you start to put on maybe an inch or two around your waist all of a sudden your belts get a little tight you have to loosen up the notch by one okay but what happens it's not just that that happens the problem with that is that you now start to feel guilty to feel bad why do you feel bad you feel a little bit of shameful why because you've been judging fat people for years and now of course you're not fat but even as you begin to even just creep towards fatness you just put on an extra inch or two of fat all the sudden you get neurotic about it you shouldn't going crazy about it it drives you nuts right now all the sudden it's like okay I gotta get back into the gym hit it really hard got a brow beat myself got a flagellate myself to stay healthy and fit and so your whole fitness routine then becomes this kind of like avoidance and escape of coming under the under the effect of your own past judgments around fat people which is the terrible source of motivation for going to the gym so that's one example right one example and that's just one facet of how this could manifest some time in the future let's say you get a girlfriend and now your girlfriend she starts to put on a few pounds this is years later but see you can't help the fact that you've been judging fat people so now she's putting on weight you start to see her as fat now all the sudden starts to bother you such to worry you you want to tell her but you don't want to offend her what do you do creates a whole problem for you right maybe you break up with her because of that maybe creates a huge argument for you guys and it's just like a a simple little thing I'm not saying that she just you know turned into a way and all of a sudden I'm saying she just put on a few pounds but it still bothers you and you don't know how to deal with it effectively so that's example number one here's another example that I want to cite in this one's for the ladies ladies love to do this what ladies love to do is they love to judge other hot ladies so if your lady no I'm talking about you have a friend or a friend of a friend or some girl that you've seen that's really hot and what you do or you know if you see your guy looking at a hot girl in your mind what you do is you call that hot girl you call her a hot [ __ ] she's not just a girl she's not a lady she's a [ __ ] she's a [ __ ] she's a little skank right because she's that model looking type she's probably a skank your thing in yourself so this is how you judge these types of women and maybe you've been judging these types of women ever since your mother was judging these types of women when you were just a teenager still back in middle school or in high school and she told you don't be a [ __ ] like those girls on the magazines or those girls in the movies and so of course now you judge the way your mother judged and so the problem with this though you might say well leo I'm not a [ __ ] so what's the problem here's the problem is that let's say now you find yourself a new boyfriend and you're you're in love with him and everything is going great and now you're in the bedroom with them right and you're gonna have sex but now you're feeling guilty and conflicted and repressed in the bedroom you can't orgasm properly you can't have multiple orgasms why not well because and then it's just one factor but one factor could be that the reason you can't is because you've been so judgmental about other people having sex that when it comes to you having sex now you feel in congruence if you fully let yourself go so of course you do still have sex but the kind of sex you have is is kind of like lame mechanical sex not the really good kind of sex and maybe you don't orgasm or if you orgasm you have a weak single orgasm you don't multiple orgasm you don't have wild crazy orgasms like you could and you're in conflict with yourself you feel guilty you're not able to kind of like let yourself go the way you should the way you want to why because you've been judging other people your whole life for doing that and now your self-image because your self-image needs to maintain integrity it needs to apply the same rules that you used on others to yourself and now is when it comes back to bite you in the ass another example have you ever rushed have you ever judged rich people like you see somebody driving a Mercedes or a Ferrari or something down the street or sitting there in a restaurant fancy restaurant with the Rolex as you're walking by on the street corner and you think yourself ah man that's such a rich douchebag look at that rich douchebag sitting there eating his rich lunch with his rich girlfriend and his rich car and his rich Rolex watch and all this stupid stuff he I bet you he's a some Wall Street broker type of guy who swindled some old grand lady out of her retirement savings and now he's sitting there and he's wining and dining his girlfriend on that money so you come up with that kind of story right and you do that over and over over again maybe you grew up in kind of a middle-class family where your parents made these kind of judgments about rich people and they told you the hey rich people don't care about middle-class people they don't care about poor people they step on people they use us and of course that that kind of judgmental attitude was also reinforced by your friends who are also probably lower middle class and so now you're an adult and here's where it backfires on you now maybe you're thinking about starting your own business or maybe you already have a business and now your business starts doing goods or to earn a lot of money but of course now there's this in congruence within you because you're starting to become rich just like those people but your mind didn't make the space for a nice rich person it automatically classified all rich people as douchebags and so now you're falling under your own judgment and it might go to the point where now you you actually sabotage your own business or maybe if you consider going to business then you let go of that dream you say yeah you know what if I went into business I would just be one of those rich douchebags so even if I succeeded I would basically be a failure and my parents wouldn't really respect me because I'd just be like one of those rich douchebags here's the thing you gotta understand about this is that this happens all very subconsciously you're not aware this is happening it's not clear to you in your mind that when you sabotage your own business or you sabotage your own relationship or your sabotage your own gym routine or something like this that this is coming from a judgment that you made five ten twenty years earlier that connection isn't made clear so you know you got to do the dot connect and got to connect all the dots that start to see this stuff it's very subtle it can be let me give you another example how about the judging newbies I love this example maybe you're at the gym with your friends and you guys have been going to the gym for the last ten years and you're all experts you've studied all the fitness routines you know exactly which exercises to do and all the right fitness moves and stuff right but then after the new year's crowd comes in every January these are all you know fresh greenhorns who've never been to the gym before and of course what do you do if you're a regular gym goer you're laughing and snickering and you're ridiculing with your buddies all the newbies that come through the door and get on the treadmill or they start doing some stupid exercise routine that you think is ridiculous that is completely against all the you know all the rules and all the norms and they don't know which weights to use or how to use them properly so as they're doing that you and your guys your buddies are watching you're watching this newbie doing this thing is newbie thing and you're watching him kind of like fail and self-destruct but you're laughing and ridicule but actually what you're doing as you're laughing in ridiculing is you're judging him now how does this come back to bite you in the ass well let's say you want to go learn some new hobby like you want to take up golf and you you're totally new to golf so now you're going to go golfing and swing at the driving range so you go there you think I'm going to be all cool you pull out your club and you swing and guess what you make a fool of yourself because you miss you can't even hit the ball on your first swing and you suddenly feel very very stupid and you feel very very self-conscious because you're standing there and you're feeling like all the expert golfers all the pros are standing around you and they're watching you and they're laughing at you now maybe they aren't or maybe they are but the fact is that you're very self conscious about it and in fact what might happen is that you go for a week to the driving range and each time you're so frustrated with how poor you're doing and you feel like you're a total noob and that you look ridiculous that a week later you just quit the whole thing you say you know what that golf thing is just so stupid it's for rich people anyways screw that golf stuff I'm just going to go back to the gym and stick to what I know how to do best and so in this way you deny yourself some new opportunity in life and you know golf business relationship does matter what it is right this new be judging is a it's a really good example you see it all over the internet too you see people doing this because you know it's really easy to judge newbies really easy to to criticize them laugh at them at their expense but then inevitably comes back to bite you now those are some examples of like negative judgments I want to give you an example of positive judgment because not all judgments are seemingly negative you might wonder well leo is it okay to make positive judgments it's still a problem here's why let's say you have a guy at the office who you perceive as being really charismatic and charming and just flirtatious and he's funny and he's got a great sense of humor really outgoing and extroverted and so you you see this guy you're really you know attracted by his personality like oh man this guy's amazing you're amazing and now you start to feel like you're inadequate because you judged him is being up here and you judge yourself as being down here maybe you're a little bit more shy reserved more introverted and you want to feel like you're more extroverted and more charming and you don't know like you you don't know how to develop that sense of humor that he has it seems so effortless for him and so now what happens is that you're five years later after you've made this judgment of him being such a charming great person is you're still interacting with other people in your office or in a different company now or wherever and you're still feeling inadequate because you're comparing yourself to him the judgment you created back to them is still being applied to you now in a sense judging is like creating a law or a rule which then your mind stores and then that law or rule of course gets applied to all future situations because your mind tries to stay consistent tries to maintain integrity with itself so if you judge a fat person here then if you ever become fat you're going to be judging yourself if you judge a [ __ ] person over there if you ever do anything [ __ ] you're gonna be judging yourself if you judge rich people anytime you make a little extra money you're gonna be judging yourself you're going to feel guilt you're going to feel shame you're going to feel inadequacy or some other kind of like low consciousness nasty type of emotion um another good example that I like is those panhandlers on the street you ever see some of those bums those dirty bums on the street it's really easy to judge those guys right so they're standing on the street begging you for a quarter and of course you know sometimes you give them a quarter but sometimes you don't and in fact you say something like man look at this guy why doesn't he just like clean himself up and go get a job at McDonald's at least he could earn more money than just standing here like a pathetic slob I bet this guy's lazy he's such a lazy bum and then every time you see a bum you call him lazy now five years later it backfires you how does it backfire you because let's say you're working on some project in your business and maybe your partner tells you hey man you've been slacking you're lazy and all of a sudden now you start to get kind of frantic and neurotic and even though you're working 50 or 60 hours a week just because your business partner called you lazy you didn't take it as a joke you actually took it seriously and now you're like well [ __ ] I should work even harder he's right I should work 80 hours a week and so what you do is you kill yourself for the next three years working 80 hours a week burn yourself out make yourself sick deny yourself the other pleasures of life estranged yourself from your family and maybe your relationship goes bad maybe your marriage gets a divorce and and all of that simply because you were reacting against your judgment of not wanting to be lazy because you call those people lazy and of course that's a rule that you created in your mind which said lazy is bad which of course means at any time I get even close to lazy or I even inch my way towards lazy I'm all the sudden bad creates a lot of problems and the last example I want to give you is the the unloving mother example which is a really great one that I love let's say that in this example you're the woman and you were a girl and you grew up with a mother that didn't give you a lot of affection criticize you all the time wasn't loving enough and this really hurt you and had a really kind of like troublesome teenage years and because you feel like you weren't getting enough love so you judge that is bad and then you told yourself you know what when I have kids I'm going to be the most loving mother ever because my mother was a selfish [ __ ] and I'm not going to be that way with my kids and that seems like a very positive rule to make in your mind right be be more loving be more selfless how great is that what could possibly go wrong well except twenty years later when you do have your own kids what happens well now you need to play that role of the selfless mother and so now you sacrifice yourself for your kids your kids walk all over you you do everything for your kids you don't take any time for yourself you don't take care of your health you don't take care of your psychological needs so you grow fat and you go psychologically neurotic slowly over the years as you're sacrificing yourself to your kids and your kids become more and more ungrateful little brats and then the same thing now happens with your husband as well and your whole family situation just goes to hell and maybe eventually you get a divorce and you grow sick with cancer why does all this happen well I'm not saying this is the only cause but one possible cause for why something like this would happen is because you set down this law very early in your childhood that told you I will never be selfish like my mother I will never be unloving like her even though you know what sometimes it's okay to be selfish sometimes you need that sometimes you need to take a vacation sometimes you need to do something for yourself at the expense of your kids and that can be normal and healthy but you don't allow yourself to do that because you've just been so harsh and judgmental on your mother about that and for you now to go back on your old promises and your old laws and rules well that means you have to change how your whole mind works and notice that in this example you would not be aware of how all this stuff is happening you'd be having problems in your family and with your kids but you wouldn't know why it's happening you would never connect the dots all the way back to some innocent seeming little judgment that you made 20 years ago so just notice how subtle it can be those are just some examples it's just the tip of the iceberg I just wanted to use these examples to kind of get your mind jogging and to start to connect the dots in your own life for you these examples might be totally different than what I talked about here yet kind of creative sort of thinking how is this working in my life fundamentally the problem here in all these examples is that your disowning a part of reality you're creating rigid rules by which now you have to live and whenever you break one of these rules and these rules by the way they're very arbitrary totally arbitrary that now you feel like well [ __ ] I can't break these we'll have to live by all these have to jump through all these hoops I have to be the perfect person I just a consistent with all my past judgments I can't admit that I was wrong and so because of this you block off a lot of avenues within reality now you can't take a vacation now you can't be a little bit lazy now you can't be rich now you can't be a newbie at something now you can't be sexual now you can't gain a little bit of weight and so on and so on and so on and what this does is it makes you inflexible in life you're not able to flow with the circumstances of life you're not able to be spontaneous in life and this creates problems for you creates guilt creates shame and largely you don't know this is going on it's just going on to you it feels like man my life feels miserable why do I feel guilty all the time why do I feel shameful all the time why do I feel unsatisfied all the time why do I feel like I can't do anything right all the time why do I keep self sabotaging every relationship every new business every new hobby that I start just doesn't seem to work for me well maybe it's because you made some judgments that are holding you back and that just backfired on you again and again and again here's one of my personal biggest insights that I've had this year from doing a lot of enlightenment work and consciousness work in workshops one of the biggest insights I had was this was that the reason that I've been a people pleaser for most of my life until recently is because and I trace this back into my past is I recognize that oh I used to judge my dad for being inconsiderate towards other people what I perceive it and consider it and I kind of thought of him as a jerk and I said to myself you know what when I grow up I don't want to be that kind of man I don't want to be the church I don't want to be the inconsiderate I want to be the kind the nice one and so that sealed my fate now whenever I interacted with people for decades after making that judgment I would always try to be the nice one because I would subconsciously be running away from that negative ideal that my dad said and I didn't just judge my dad as being inconsiderate so judge other people's being inconsiderate so it was a combination of various judgments but basically that created this kind of a people-pleasing personality profile for me and it just kind of fired and fired and fired I didn't know why it was happening only years later after lots and lots and lots of consciousness work that I finally stumble upon by accident this discovery that all of course I made that judgment when I was really young and it's hung around with me and stuck around for four decades and I've been paying the price and I didn't know what was going on there because you know what sometimes in life you got to be inconsiderate you might wonder like well Lee oh yeah of course you don't want to be inconsiderate what's wrong with that law what's wrong with that judgment but the fact is that sometimes you are inconsiderate in life sometimes you do have to be a dick sometimes you can't help it especially like in business or in some kind of negotiation situation or in a relationship where you have to break off the relationship when you know it's good for both of you to break it off but you don't because you're just so used to being a people pleaser and you don't want to disappoint somebody or be perceived as a jerk right you need that flexibility and I deny that to myself so that created some problems for me all right so how do we get you to recognize this kind of stuff for yourself these kind of deep insights well I got a great exercise for you which is actually the exercise that I use to discover this insight for myself so here it is you're going to take out a couple sheets of paper and a pen do that right now you're going to do two things with this paper and pen firstly you're going to write out every single judgment that you've ever made about other people you're going to make a giant long list it might be a hundred or 300 items on this list second thing you're going to do is you're going to write out every judgment you ever made about yourself and again this will be another list separate list with another hundred to three hundred different items there could be a lot and the key as you're doing this is that you want to do a kind of a stream of consciousness where you get in the flow and you just let pour out of you might take you 30 minutes to sit there and just let this list pour out without any filtering so the most evil vile harshest judgments you've ever made write all those down it's very important also make sure that you include the positive judgments - not just the negative ones so if you judge somebody a dick you put that one on there and if you judge someone a princess you put that one on there and then after you're done with both these lists then what you can do is going to put a star or a checkmark next to those judgments on the list that you feel have a strong potential to backfire on you or to create neurotic patterns in your life how do you know which ones to select well they'll kind of just jump out at you for example when I came up with the judgment he's an inconsiderate dick it's like oh yeah I know that I always behave in a way where I try to minimize my own inconsiderateness and if I ever think of myself as inconsiderate and I really feel bad and shameful oh that's an important one all right so that's how you can find out now what I want to do is I want to actually demonstrate for you how this exercise works because it's a little shocking when you hear it and you see a done in person so what I'm going to do is I've got my timer here and I have it set for five minutes I'm going to set this timer and I'm going to give you the first list which is all the judgments that I've ever made about other people and you're going to hear me go into a stream of consciousness and I'm just going to not filter myself at all and just talk for five minutes straight and say whatever comes up to my mind for these judgments alright let's begin I got five minutes on the clock go alright so every judgment that I've ever made about other people [ __ ] prick inconsiderate ungrateful thief cheat ugly smelly disgusting foolish beautiful attractive hot sexy handsome cute adorable fat pig [ __ ] hippie hipster douche bag scumbag bastard [ __ ] deceitful criminal neglectful cold violent uncaring ignorant stupid low consciousness neurotic dysfunctional crazy insane weird odd not normal normal cool uncool hip rich poor lazy careless ignorant dogmatic closed-minded religious ideological rationalist myopic arrogant egotistical selfish narcissistic selfless caring kind loving humble brilliant creative genius strong weak skinny ugly teeth ugly face ugly nose camel nose [ __ ] [ __ ] skank player womanizer immature juvenile ridiculous embarrassing greedy corrupt shameful evil bad human being disgusting human being I would never [ __ ] that humorous charming confident insecure needy codependent nerd geek dweeb pale pasty scrawny masculine feminine girly manly hairy okay so that was my first list now I'm going to do the second list which is all the judgments that I've ever made about myself again completely unfiltered whatever comes to mind five minutes on the clock go right every judgment I've ever made about myself mmm arrogant egotistical humble reserved introverted extroverted tall skinny lanky effeminate masculine assertive lacking assertiveness indecisive smart intelligent wise wise beyond my years creative artistic brilliant inadequate less than others shy lacking confidence lacking assertiveness people pleaser pushover ball old ugly funny teeth bucktooth big nose small dick fat skinny handsome nice eyes effeminate not manly enough not masculine enough grounded secure also insecure ambitious hardworking disciplined lazy successful upper middle-class cheat thief liar honest truthful coward good student kind caring player jerk [ __ ] mean and consider it manipulative scheming plotting disloyal inauthentic also authentic small jaw wannabe humorous bad sense of humor awkward weird above-average superior better than other people right good bad just workaholic non-drinker smug condescending intellectual nerdy different exceptional hard-working neurotic hypocritical complex deep racist womanizer alright that was my second list so hopefully that opened your eyes to the possibilities here I want you to create the same exact kind of list except your list is not going to be limited to five minutes but it's going to be much longer get everything out of your system all right get it all out of your system no filters this is not the time to be nice or polite or politically correct so that's your exercise that's your assignment now to just recap this topic we started off asking the question how do you stop judging yourself well one way that you stop judging yourself is basically this is the answer in a nutshell is that you stop judging other people you cannot stop judging yourself if you continue to judge other people hopefully you can now see the dynamic where this is a double-edged sword it cuts both ways it cuts forward and it cuts backwards so be very careful and you might wonder well how do I stop judging other people leo and here's my answer to that first of all be mindful of how you judge other people judgments are usually much more subtle than we think it's usually not as black and white as oh she's fat or oh he's an [ __ ] I mean those are very obvious also be very mindful of the jokes you make with your friends with your circle of friends how you like to make jokes about others at the expense of others and in that case you're judging them be very careful about that just be more mindful of how often you do judge people you do it a lot more often than you think and this takes a period of increased aware and start to see this also be more mindful of how you're done your judgments are damaging you so you can see how they're damaging other people but then see the second side of the blade pointing back at you right when you slice with it so this is what we mean by double edged sword so notice for example that when you judge fat people that makes you insecure about your own weight notice that when you judge rich people that creates a problem for you with money notice that when you judge money people that creates a problem for you in the bedroom with sexuality notice these things right notice the actual limits kind of the cage that you construct around yourself notice that again that takes a period of mindfulness takes a while to see that and you know to jumpstart you and to help you to do that right now do the exercise create both of these lists sit down really think about it after you do the exercise which you'll notice for the next week or so you'll be walking around town with your friends and all this kind of stuff you're going to be more mindful automatically to the different judgments you make and then you can go deeper with it and you can take a look at those judgments that you put a star next to the ones that already you know are backfiring on you and you can work on those even deeper and I don't really have time to go into that I'll probably cover that in some other episode but that's it for now so practice the mindfulness see what's really going on how you're using these judgments against yourself and do this exercise alright that's it I'm signing off please click the like button for me help support actualize that work by leaving your feedback there also post 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