Improve Your Judgment
Hi fellows! As you might have heard, our excellence comes not as a result of a single action. It’s a compound effect of habits and gradual practice on improving yourself and correcting your own flaws.
Each of us has lots of things to work on, but most of our flaws try to hide behind. The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius had not been an exception before he internalized Stoic wisdom and became the teacher for all the humankind that lived after him, those who were inspired by his Meditations. But even Marcus Aurelius also had a great mentor who helped him work on his character — Junius Rusticus.
It seems that you cannot become a teacher without being a student. Stoics benefited from their tutors’ wisdom by treating them both as models, whose behavior they were inspired to emulate, and mentors who could give them valuable advice.
But why do we need the teacher in the first place? Aesop put it beautifully in one of his fables. Each of us has two sacks, one with the flaws of others, and it hangs within our view. Another is behind our back, filled with our own faults. That’s why we see others’ flaws quite clearly, but can’t really see our own.
So we need someone else around to spot those faults. And that someone doesn’t need to stand there all the time. Instead, it can be the image of the person we deeply respect and admire; we call it the Role Model.
So let’s proceed with the practical exercise. I framed it from the perspective of Marcus Aurelius. We will learn how the Role Model can help us have better judgments, cope with insults and other negative emotions.
Judgment Exercise
Hi! My name is Marcus Aurelius. I am an emperor from the Golden Age of Rome.
During my time as Roman Emperor, I fought many wars for our empire’s glory and peace and faced many hardships. But I found that people’s inner peace doesn’t depend on neither external stability nor fortunate events.
For us Stoics, the key to inner peace lies in our judgment. The wrong judgment will lead to disturbance and suffering even in the most fortunate circumstances. While right one will preserve our inner calmness against all of life’s hardships.
So the goal for this first lesson is to teach you how judgments affect our inner peace. We will also learn how to change them so that you can keep your stoic calm under harsh circumstances.
Stoics believe that our mind’s balanced state is disturbed by intense emotions, especially by negative ones, such as anger, despair, fear, or envy.
But also, an obsessive passion might disturb our inner peace.
Our emotions are not caused by things or events themselves but by our judgment about them.
Think of a perfectly straight stick. When you put it underwater, it will appear as bent or broken to the onlooker.
While external things and events may not be under our control, we certainly control our judgment. Therefore, we have the key to our inner peace always at our disposal.
Let me give you an example. Imagine you are insulted by two different people. Both are calling you “a failure.” Now, if the first person appeared to be a mad man who randomly insulted you in the street, you most likely wouldn’t care too much. Buf if a beloved one, like your father or your sister, would call you “a failure,” it would probably hurt you.
But why is that? In both cases, the insult was the same. The reason lies in our value judgments and expectations. The person on the street doesn’t know you, and you might not even care what he thinks of you. Also, the fact that he appears to be mentally ill makes his behavior expectable.
On the other hand, we usually want our beloved ones to have a positive picture of us. We expect them not to insult and hurt us. Even though it’s ultimately not under our control.
When was the last time you were insulted? How did it make you feel? Try to identify the underlying judgment and expectation towards the other person.
This exercise is supposed to emphasize the role that our judgments play in forming our emotions.
So far, so good. But in which way should we change our judgments to preserve our inner calmness when we face adversity and hardship?
We should change them in a way so that they reflect the level of control we have over a particular object, person, or event.
Think of it like that — we don’t control external things, such as the weather, illness, and other people’s behavior.
So the reason we get hurt by other peoples’ insults is that we assume them to act according to our expectations about how they ought to behave towards us. And since we cannot ultimately control behaviors or opinions of others, such unrealistic expectations might provoke frustration and anger when those expectations are not met.
I firmly believe that we should focus and care more about the things within our power, about our character and judgments, and less about external things.
It just so happens that we as humans are naturally drawn to them.
Let’s leave it here for now. We will discuss internal and external things and how we should deal with them in the next lesson. I hope you will join me!
And now, I would like to introduce you to an exercise that will help you to control your emotions through exercising your judgment.
The exercise is called “Role model.” Imagine that an ideal Stoic person observes what you are doing. Whenever you are about to lose your inner peace, you should ask him or her how you could reframe your perspective, accounting for things within and without your control.
This ideal person might be your favorite teacher, grandfather, priest, or favorite author. Just think of them as Stoics in this exercise.
Hope this exercise helps.
Remember, if you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
See you in the next lesson!
P.S. If you liked this exercise, I have written more lessons like that. Just in case you are curious to explore more, sign up for the newsletter: https://www.alter-ego.app/
The themes I cover are: getting disciplined, reducing anxiety, learning about your life values, decision-making, the art of happiness, and being present in the moment.
The lessons are based on the primary sources of wisdom from more than 2500 years of history of philosophy, from Plato, Aristotle, Lao Tzu, Seneca to Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, Nasim Taleb, and others.
Wish you a nice day and clear judgment!
