Fear of Judgment
La version française de cet article est disponible ici.
Fear of judgment is both a cause and symptom of a lack of self-confidence. In this article, which is part of a series on self-confidence, I explore the roots and impact of this fear before showing an effective way to start letting go of it.
The worry that others are judging you can lead to poor choices — or to doing nothing at all. A prime example is when you act against your own intuition in the hopes of satisfying the wishes of someone who might judge you. I have spent countless sessions with clients discussing poor decisions they took as a result of ignoring their instincts out of their desire to satisfy the presumed wishes of someone else.
Constantly worrying that others are judging you unfavourably can be a source of considerable stress and a serious distraction from work. But the effects over the long term can be particularly damaging: a series of career decisions made primarily to satisfy other people’s expectations can lead you to a role that no longer aligns with your values and is far removed from what motivates you.
In any event, when you try to guess what other people are thinking, you are likely to get it wrong. For example, a client of mine regretted ignoring her intuition about how best to approach an important project she had been working on. She had told herself that she needed to adapt her methods to better correspond to what she imagined to be her client’s preferences. However, in the course of a mid-term discussion with her client, it became clear that he would have preferred her initial strategy: he knew the way that she worked, and it was precisely for that reason he had chosen her for the project.
The fact of the matter is, you cannot read other peoples’ thoughts; the judgment that you imagine someone else is taking is a work of fiction of your creation. And your fears and preoccupations form the essence of that fiction.
Indeed, most of the time, we are too busy with our own problems to have the time to worry about other people’s shortcomings. Some people do occasionally judge others. However, those judgments say much more about the people who make them than about the people whom they judge: they are usually the result of their own faults, rather than those of the person whom they judge.
If, in spite of all of this, you find yourself spending time and energy worrying about what other people are thinking, you can teach yourself progressively to reduce the impact of the supposed negative judgments of others. The next time you imagine that someone is judging you, stop for a second and take a few seconds to mentally list the other possibilities.
For example, if you imagine that someone is sneering at you in a meeting, isn’t it possible that they:
just left a difficult meeting with a colleague?
just received a piece of bad news?
simply have a bad headache?
Once you get in the habit of doing this exercise, you will realise that, most of the time, it is highly unlikely that what you are doing is actually the target of negative judgments. That will free up your time and energy to focus on real problems that are more deserving of your attention.
What habits might be holding you back? You can get in touch with me here to discuss how we might be able to work together to address them. If you would like to find out more about me first, you can do so here.