quick to judge

june 18 | weekly warm-up

Reflect on your creative fears and how they show up in the judgments you make about others. What types of creative expression do you often judge as good or bad, perhaps without making an effort to understand it?

How do you think this judgment affects you through the different stages of your creative process?

“When we make judgments of ourselves or of others, we cast attention to a thought or belief that is limiting and sometimes negative and when taken to an extreme can put ourselves, or our flexible mind, into a box. So, thinking about how we look at and feel about the world and ourselves can affect whether we are open, accepting, and flexible enough to work at the top of our creativity.” — Alice Berry

Judgment is a creativity killer. In creative circles, we often talk about not judging ourselves, but many of us don’t realize that judging others also inhibits our creativity.

Is being judgmental of others making you less creative?

If we value the freedom to express ourselves authentically and experiment with our creative voices, then we need to be able to give others the same space that we want for ourselves. This is not always easy. When my son sticks his air pod in my ear and says, “Mom, listen to this new song”, I resist the urge to immediately dismiss it just because it doesn’t sound like the rap and r&b that I grew up listening to. When my daughter tells me about all the piercings she’s going to get as soon as she’s of age, I resist the urge to voice my fears about how people will perceive her because of them. When I’m not a fan of a particular writer’s work, I resist the urge to question their success.

We can be discerning about what we like and don’t like without making judgments about what’s good or bad. When we are constantly making judgments, we stifle our own creativity.

Berry goes on to say, “Opening our attitudes and thinking can help us develop a flexibility of mind and acceptance of difference that benefits our own creativity. Assuming you know what someone’s work means without seriously making the effort to learn or understand it, then dismissing it without making that effort limits your own ability to learn, understand, and creatively engage.”

So how can we become more aware of this dynamic? We can question our judgments when they come up. We can find connections between our judgments of others and our own fears. This is our exercise for this week.