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4 I The Best Online Education System in the world
ACCEPT JUDGMENT HUMBLY-GROW STRONGER AFTER
Kathlyn Q. Barrozo
Class of 1991, University of Santo Tomas
B.S. Medical Technology
I am deathly afraid of being judged. The thought of being judged scares me because people can be so wrong
sometimes. We don’t carry equal capacities to render judgment. I don’t present myself as being the best judge
either. This is why I recognize the weaknesses in others. I respect other people’s judgments. I appreciate that
there can be times when others are called to render judgment. What is scary in that prospect is the risk of
making unsound judgments. When I study a job offer in my online work, I need to exercise diligence before
deciding whether to take the job or to decline it. There have been times when I made errors of judgment, or
when others made errors of judgment on me.
Such as before the past year ended when I accepted this job offer from someone who had seemed genuinely
friendly and helpful. In my line of work, we have to rely on emails and online communication lines to relay
questions and answers and to transmit completed work. Sometimes, when we’re lucky, our clients want to
communicate via Skype. But more often than not, we work “blind”. We don’t see our clients ever and they
don’t see us except for the profiles we have in our worksite. We simply rely on feedback on each of our pages
before we decide on which client/contractor to accept/hire for a specific job.
We judge based on trust. Going back to that job offer I was talking about, the client had always found nothing
to complain about with the submissions I made to her before. But when I billed for a particularly
comprehensive and thoroughly-researched write-up she had issued instructions for me to craft, she raised hell
about the work time, even threatened to give me a bad feedback score. I found that deplorable, but what
could I do? I was just a helpless contractor who relied on good feedback scores to snag me the next job.
Anyway, the issue was resolved by the worksite administration. They said everything in my work diary was in
accordance to existing policies, and they didn’t find anything to question about my work input. However, I
decided to err on the side of caution. I decided to give the client full refund of what she had paid me, and gave
her a cryptic message to make her see I wanted no bad blood to exist between us. In other words, I wanted to
protect my reputation and the best way I could do this was by being humble. So sue me!
Others may judge this as weakness and admission of guilt on my part, but it was never that. Sometimes, the
judgment we make hurts others more than we know it. But it is upon those others to make us see our errors of
judgment so that we may not commit the same mistakes again. In my case, I hoped that was the end of it. And
it was, thank God!
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
1.
How do people sometimes make errors of judgment?
2.
How do you fix errors of judgment? Cite examples, if necessary.
3.
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Explain this saying in detail and through examples.
4.
What would you have done if you had been in the writer’s shoes?
5.
Why should we never make hasty judgments on other people?