Pay Attention to Your Thoughts

The first step is to become aware of the VOJ. People who have lived with this chapter’s credo are amazed at the number of negative and judgmental statements they’ve made throughout the day. One student counted eighty-seven negative judgmental thoughts on a particular Saturday and a hundred on Sunday. Usually the ratio of negative to positive thoughts is quite high - four to one, even eight to one. Several of our students used the metaphor of rodents to describe these thoughts, calling them mice, rats, or weasels.

So start noticing that the judgment is present. Tally your judgmental thoughts when that is feasible: during meetings and conversations, while driving, or when you are part of an audience and not really participating. Be especially alert to the VOJ’s presence when you have difficulty, feel fear, or feel depressed. Look to your body for clues; it will tell you when judgment is lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce. You might feel a heaviness in your cheat or an overall body tension. You might develop an upset stomach or a headache. Or you might feel blue…

Attack the Judgment

Once you’ve identified what your VOJ is saying, turn to it and yell. Keep the message short. A classic one is “Get the hell out of my life!” At this point, if the VOJ feels threatened, it might come back with a rational-sounding statement such as, “Yes, but you do know that jobs are hard to find.” This is simply a more subtle form of judgment at work. It pretends to be reality; it’s judgment in disguise. Yell at it, too - out loud if necessary…

Make the Judgment Look Ridiculous

Some people find that it is effective to take an especially bothersome statement of judgment and blow it up like a balloon until it bursts.

To do this, shut your eyes and imagine that you can hear and see a VOJ statement - maybe, “People don’t like me” - in its normal tone. Then begin to intensify and enlarge it, making it more and more strident, perhaps flashing in brilliant neon lights. Then make the voice scream out in a tremendous echo chamber, with mile-high letters in view of thousands of people.

If this works for you, you will find your own creative ways to intensify, enlarge, amplify, and explode the judgment. And you are likely to laugh out loud as you realize how significant and puny the VOJ really is - or would be without your attention to support it.

Instead of prematurely asking what you should do, try something new. Ask no questions rather than an action question. Try meditating, exercising, sensing your arms and legs, or any of the approaches we have suggested for putting you in touch with your inner creative ability. Then try answering any or all of the following questions:

• What is it I don’t yet understand? This question or ones like it can penetrate the mind for clarity and understanding.

• What is it that I’m really feeling? When there is a problem there are usually emotions - fear, anger, hurt, or sorrow - and this question can help you become aware of seeing them specifically.

• What is it that I’m not seeing? Problems usually come from not seeing clearly. By asking about what you are not seeing specifically, almost as if it consists of material objects, you heighten your perceptual ability.

• What voice is speaking? Is it your Voice of Judgment, your objective intelligence, your voice of childhood emotions or fears, or the voice of your Essence speaking inside of you? You can bet that if you have a problem, the objective intelligence and the Essence are relatively silent. But personifying and identifying the inner voices contributing to a problem sometimes is enough in itself to achieve the clarity needed for action.

This kind of exploratory questioning for clarity doesn’t take long, especially when preceded or followed by meditation.

The ruthless and relentless game. Carry around in your back pocket these dozen ruthless and relentless questions. Flourish them whenever you feel you are not getting to the heart of a personal or professional problem.

• At the moment, what is my aim? This question is about your deepest wish, not goals, for the next fiscal year. Put your key life purpose on the line at that moment, not in the past or the future.

• If the truth be known, what’s really going on? There is a certain magic in asking for the truth. Use this question to cut through to the basics in any situation so that you can act with efficiency.

• What is the VOJ saying? This question reminds you to be aware of and eliminate the negative effect of inner blame and criticism.

• Is this who I am, or who I’m attempting to be? The central contradiction of your life is between the Essence and ego. This question helps silence the ego.

• What is it that this person provokes in me? Instead of concentrating on questions such as: “What’s wrong with her?” “Why are they doing this to me?” focus on what you can do something about: your own actions, thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

• What is the objective reality? Appeal to your own objective intelligence with this one. Strip away all the rest: fears, judgments, chattering of the mind, ego, false personality. This question acts like a meditation: All that is extraneous slips away and you concentrate on what is real.

• What is the emotional truth? Four emotions - fear, anger, hurt, and sorrow - cloud your thinking. If anger, or any of the emotions, is getting in the way, you must acknowledge that truth first rather than blame other people.

• What pain am I avoiding? Over and over, our speakers, students, and clients point out that real learning and progress arise from pain and difficulty. This question teaches you to pay attention to the pain in order to gain insight.

• What stubbornness am I holding on to? You know intellectually that the only constant thing is change, but you might find it difficult to live this truth. Change isn’t the problem; holding on to stubbornness is. Acknowledge and understand that with this question.

• Is this choice the same as my real choice? Your real problems might be different from the apparent one.

• What is it that I don’t yet understand? Again, if you feel upset, there is something that you do not understand. If other questions fail to lead you to this understanding, you can just ask yourself directly.

• Who said that, my mother or my father? This question smokes out the VOJ.

Listening to intuition is not the act of concentrating on what you think you want. It is not hedonism, a move toward the most pleasurable short-term alternative. It is not giving vent to the inner emotional child left over from your infancy. It is simply paying clear attention, without mind chatter and emotions, to the most appropriate alternative that comes from the creative Essence.

Our speakers seem to tell us that intuition kicks in precisely when they move through the stress and the frustration to a calm, clear state beyond. At that moment, the appropriate action appears almost as a solid conviction: take the case of Robert Medearis. Instead of emotion, he prefers to talk about energy:

I think everybody has a certain amount of energy about them. And I think that one of the critically important things is to allow that energy to take place. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t try to channel it. Let it emerge. Because that energy is the source, it’s the food for the idea… Allow it to ferment, allow it to come out, allow it to bubble up if you will even though you might think that it’s somewhat negative in origin. Allow it to manifest.

Step 3: Choose Discerningly…

The memories that inform this choice-guiding function in our brains Goleman refers to as the “wisdom of the emotions”; by this he means the collected experiences of what has and hasn’t worked for us in life, and what we draw upon in evaluating a decision. Our own wisdom is then made available to us emotionally (as feelings) and intestinally (as a bodily, gut response). Therefore, in order to make a good decision, we need access to our feelings and gut reactions to the alternatives…

The key to step three is to make discerning decisions by applying more than one way of knowing, and in particular not applying just cognitive judgment by itself, which is informed but not reliable on its own. We aren’t suggesting making only emotional decisions, either. We all have examples of emotions getting people in trouble (though usually those are impulse emotions, and that’s a very different thing), so we’re not saying to swap your brain for your heart or your gut. We’re inviting you to integrate all your decision-making faculties, and to be sure you make space so your emotional and intuitive ways of knowing can surface in the process…

Doing this requires that you educate and mature your access to and awareness of your emotional/intuitive/spiritual ways of knowing (or however you may name these affective aspects of our shared humanity). For centuries, the most commonly affirmed path to such maturity has been that of personal practices such as journaling, prayer or spiritual exercises, meditation, integrated physical practices like yoga or Tai Chi, and so on…

Emotional, intuitive, and spiritual forms of knowing are usually subtle, quiet, and even shy. Rarely do people get access to their deepest wisdom by rushing around a few hours before a deadline and talking a lot or surfing the Web. It’s a slower, quieter thing. Practices are just that—practice. We both practice regularly, month in and month out—especially during our off season, when there’s no pressure to perform and we can focus on just doing the practice and gaining strength and balance.