Good morning and welcome to the Increase Your Impact podcast. I'm Justin Sua, episode 1,771.

Today we're talking about curiosity versus judgment. It is really easy to look at a person and to judge their behavior based on their character.

We're really quick, really quick to label somebody based on what they do or what they don't do.

For example, if somebody shows up late, it's easy to say, oh, they're late because they're disrespectful.

If somebody cuts you off, oh, they cut you off because they're a jerk.

If somebody does something that you do not approve of, you and me and all of us

immediately, easily start to attach a label that could go after their character. Now on the flip side,

if you were to show up late, we would hope that people would understand that it was because we stopped on this side

of the road to help somebody. If you show up with dirty clothes, you would hope that people

would know that your washer and dryer was broken and you had to wear something that wasn't

necessarily clean. Obviously, as you can tell,

making these stories up on the spot. But this is called the fundamental attribution error, where we judge

people's behaviors, what they do or don't do to their character. And we judge what we do to the

circumstance and based on our circumstance. And so how do you stop that? My invitation is to

pause and ask yourself, what's the situation? What do I not know of this situation? Now, by doing this,

it helps you be less judgmental and more curious of the situation. We can't look at somebody who might be

struggling on the outside and all of a sudden think that we know why they're struggling.

We should ask and pause and say, oh, I wonder how it can help that person or I wonder what they

could be going through. Now, in addition to that, we might look at someone who looks like they have

seemingly the perfect

life. Everything is put together, happy relationship, happy family. But what we also need to

understand is we need to be curious there and know that, hey, that person might be struggling

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