Latina Leadership Lessons: Approaching New Experiences Without Judgment

In my last blog post I asked you to pay more attention to when you’re comfortable and when you’re not – and what that means to you. Are you allowing people to cross certain boundaries of yours when perhaps you should make your discomfort known (even if only to acknowledge it to yourself) or, on the other hand, are you perhaps complaining “too much” – in a way that is hard for others to hear?

Knowing our own boundaries and guarding them for ourselves and for others who count on us is an important lesson. Sometimes just learning to pay attention to our own discomfort and figure out what it means is a big step! And then, once we’ve identified our discomfort and the source of it, learning how we can be absolutely true to ourselves without compromise is another important lesson.

So let’s talk about the next stage of development. After simply relaying the message about if we’re comfortable
or not, we next start learning by the physical responses we get from the things and people that are around us.

I have heard that as small babies we only have two fears: one is of falling, and the other is of loud noises.
Other than that, we are wide open to interpret the varied things that happen to us in a multitude of ways. This
means we come to things without pre-judging them and learn about them through direct experience – not what someone else tells us.

We start taking action and learning from the feedback we get. The feedback, at least initially, is mostly physical.
We smile at someone because we are smiled at and we see how the reaction pleases others.

Similarly, we touch things and taste things and learn by putting everything in our mouths, right? Thank
goodness we don’t have memories of that time in our life. Eeew!

But how often do we as adults come at new things completely open and new and learn to judge it solely from our own experience and not based on what others tell us? Josie Garza, Executive Director for the National Latino Children’s Institute (NLCI), told us about her strong belief in reserving judgment, especially when working with children.

She gave us examples within her interview of why she feels that is so important and how, even when making value judgments, keeping those judgments separate from how we feel about people is another key factor. Recall how she was able to set boundaries with a key young person who was a staff member (and explain that certain behavior was unacceptable) while impressing upon him that as a person he was still important to her.

Reflect on how and when you make judgments too soon (I know I do that, from time to time!) and why it might be useful to hold off on those until gathering more information.

Until next time, take care of that little girl inside of you…