Observation = Effective Communication while Judgement = Disconnection #184

How do we separate what we see with what we think of it and why is this such a really helpful skill in our lives?

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I think that differentiating between observation and judgment helps us to communicate more effectively and our lives are often a whole lot easier if we simply communicate more effectively.

Lots of times the arguments, the frustrations, the tough spots we get put in can be traced to simply a lack of effective communication. Let's look at the difference between observation and judgment because this is one pain point that's easy for a lot of us to get into.

Observation means to simply look at what we see and communicate it.

For example, I did this painting with my daughter yesterday, and I could look at this and say, "Oh, this is a beautiful painting we did together."



That's a judgment.

I have looked at something, I have assessed. I have said what I think of it.

Here's an observation.

An observation is when I look at this and I say, "I see blue, orange, red and green paint on here. I see letters on here that appear to spell Madeleine."

These are observations.

Now, you could throw some judgments in there.

You could say, "Oh, that's a beautiful green curtain behind your head."

That includes both a judgment and an observation.

Or you could just see something like these dusty computer monitors and say, "Jerry is such a disgusting pig."

Now, that is essentially a judgment based on an observation.

For communication, it's advantageous to focus on observations because observations we can generally agree on. Almost anyone, we can look and see some of the dust on the computer monitors and say, "Yes, there's some dust on those computer monitors," and we can each make our own assessments.

Some of us might say, "He's a filthy disgusting pig. Wipe his computer monitors."

Others of us might say, "I have dust on my computer monitor too. That's normal."

And others of us might say, "Oh, that's beautiful. He's had these computers so long that there's dust on them."

You see, judgments often are what get us in trouble. Our observations lots of times meanwhile are what we are really trying to communicate. We mean to just describe the world around us to the people around us and the problem is when we wrap everything we describe up in judgment, then often we trigger people into arguments and we had no intention of doing that.

We simply were trying to describe the world around us and we end up being completely ineffective at communicating what we were communicating, and then we get frustrated.

For example, if you came over here and someone asked, "What did you think of Jerry's house?"

You might look around and say, "Well, he had this ugly painting up from his daughter, and then he had dust on his computer monitors like a filthy pig."

Now, if you have communicated that with someone who is a big fan, then they might just not even hardly hear or be able to share the experience. The person might say, "Well, you're just a jerk. Jerry's awesome and I hate that you said these things about him."

When all you wanted to communicate was, “Well, it was a bit dusty and there were some paintings there,” those are kind of impartial things to communicate.

But what happens when we wrap things up in judgment, we have a hard time connecting with each other. I think what most of us are trying to do when we are communicating, I think most of us what we really want to do is connect with each other. We are hoping to connect with each other. We are hoping for someone to understand us and when we communicate an observation it makes that easier.

For example, I saw a comment on one of my posts recently on Steem that had a lot of ju