I am not good at this.
I need to say that up front, because everything that follows will sound like I think I’ve figured something out that I haven’t. Not even close. I fail at this daily. Sometimes hourly. Sometimes before I’ve blinked half a dozen times while lying in bed waiting for the morning alarm to sound.
We all know we’re not supposed to judge. We KNOW it. We tell our kids not to do it. We tell ourselves not to do it. We’ve heard it in every sermon, every self-help book, every professional development we’ve been forced to endure.
You don’t know another person’s struggles and all that.
Yeah, good, no judgements. That’s Kool & The Gang and Happy Days are here again and the Fonz says “Ayyyy!”
Then I open my phone, and within three scrolls I’ve already decided six people are idiots. And I’m sorry, but you may have been one of them.
We live in a world that has been engineered, from the ground up, to make us angry at each other. Social media doesn’t connect us. It sorts us. It feeds us the worst version of the people we disagree with and asks us to believe that’s who they really are. Demagogues on both sides of the aisle figured out a long time ago that fear is more useful than truth and outrage is more profitable than understanding. The machine gives us new reasons every day to assume the worst about one another, and we take the bait because it feels righteous. We tell ourselves it’s discernment. It’s not. It’s just judgment that we’ve given ourselves permission to feel good about.
There’s a concept in leadership and communication circles called “assuming positive intent.” The idea is simple. When someone says or does something that bothers you, your first assumption should be that they meant well but communicated poorly, or that they’re operating from information you don’t have. You give them the benefit of the doubt before you give them the verdict.
It sounds easy.
It’s not.
It is the hardest thing I try to do.
Oh…..man…. it is sooooooo the hardest thing I try to do.
Because here’s the problem. I have a superb memory, like a gozillion elephants worth of good memory, and I can repeat almost verbatim conversations I had a decade ago. I especially have this freakish memory for the things that hurt. Most of us do. We remember the offhand comment a coworker made three years ago that felt like a shot. We remember the neighbor who said something sideways about our yard, our kids, our choices. We remember the person from the other party who posted something so wrong, so loud, so sure of itself that we wrote them off entirely. We put them in human waste file. Case closed. That’s who they are. Law & Order dun-dun sound.
And we hold onto those moments because it feels like survival. If I remember what hurt me, I can protect myself from it happening again. The problem is that remembering the wound often means forgetting the person. It means one bad interaction becomes the whole story. One careless sentence becomes a life sentence.
But was that the intention? That’s the question I don’t ask often enough. The coworker who said something that stung. Was that aimed at me, or were they just having a terrible day? The neighbor who made a comment about my yard. Did they mean that the way I took it? I don’t actually know, because I never asked. I just decided.
But here’s the rub. Even if someone did mean it. Even if the slight was real. Is the right move really to carry that around? Or is the right move to sit down and talk about it?
Yall, remember when people use to talk about issues? Back before social media and memes and gotchas?
I do.
I’ll be honest. I’ve got things under the surface. Most of us do. Grudges I haven’t spoken aloud because I don’t know what would happen if I did. There are conversations I’ve avoided because I’m afraid of what comes next. What if I bring it up and it goes sideways? What if the relationship doesn’t survive the honesty? So I stay quiet, and the resentment just bubbles, composting into something worse than the original offense ever was.
That’s the trap. Silence feels like peace, but it’s not peace. It’s just the argument you haven’t had yet, getting worse while you wait.
So how do you tell the difference? How do you know if someone meant well and just said it wrong, or if they really are who you think they are? I don’t have an answer for that. I wish I did. But I think you have to talk to them before you decide. You have to actually ask. Most people, when you sit across from them and have the conversation, turn out to be a lot more human than the version of them you’ve been arguing with in your head. Some of them are still difficult. But difficult is not the same thing as the enemy.
I know this because I got it wrong once in a way I can’t fix.
There was someone in my life I spent years convinced had zero positive intent toward me. None. I was sure of it. Everything they said, I ran through the filter I’d already built, and it always came back the same way. I had them figured out.
Then they were gone. And once the anger didn’t have anywhere to go anymore, I started noticing things I’d ignored. Things they’d done that were kind. Moments I had read wrong. They were more complicated than I ever let them be, and I never gave them the chance to show me that.
I was wrong. And I can’t go back and tell them that.
That’s the thing about judgment. It feels so certain in the moment. It feels like you see the situation clearly. But you don’t. You just told yourself the same story so many times that you stopped questioning it.
I’m not saying everyone has positive intent. Some people don’t. The world has people in it who mean exactly what they say and are fine with the damage. These people are called ass… er…buttholes. Pardon my French and excuse me if that word offends any delicate sensibilities, but it’s true. YOU KNOW IT IS TRUE. Some people are just simply ass…er, again I mean, buttholes.
But there are fewer of them than we think. Far fewer than social media wants us to believe. Most of the people who frustrate us, offend us, and disappoint us are just people. They’ve got their own stuff going on that we know nothing about.
Holding onto judgment will cost you more than it ever cost the person you’re judging. Every single time.
I’m still working on this. I’ll probably always be working on this. But I’d rather be the man who’s trying than the one who’s so sure of himself that he never even considers he might be wrong.
Giving people the benefit of the doubt isn’t something you master. It’s something you practice by being honest about how often you fail at it.
I fail at it a lot. But I’m trying.
And I think that’s the whole point.
Josh Beavers is an award-winning columnist who earned multiple Best Columnist awards from the Louisiana Press Association. He traded the newsroom for the classroom in 2014.