Why you shouldn't be a JUDGE? | Never JUDGE someone quickly | Sawan Kumar - Best Motivational Coach

The instinct to judge people quickly costs you relationships, deals, and your own peace of mind — and the fix is a 10-second pause that almost nobody practices. I learned this the hard way driving through Dubai traffic last week, and the lesson saved me from making the same mistake the very next day in a client conversation.

Direct Answer: You shouldn't judge people quickly because you only see the surface behaviour, never the reason behind it. A reckless driver may be racing to a hospital; a 24-year-old man acting childishly on a train may have just regained his eyesight after 23 years of blindness. Real leaders read the book before reviewing the cover.

The reckless driver story that changed how I judge people

Yesterday I was driving with my wife and a car shot past us — extremely reckless, crossing every speed limit, weaving like the road belonged to him. Within seconds we had a full case file built in our heads: bad driver, no respect for rules, going to cause an accident, the kind of person who ruins it for everyone.

Then we hit the next signal together. And I watched him turn straight into the hospital gate.

That single turn rewrote the entire story. He wasn't reckless — he was terrified. Someone he loved was likely inside that ambulance bay, and every second he saved on the road might have mattered. Before I knew that one fact, I had already convicted him in my mind. After I knew it, I felt embarrassed for the speed at which I'd built the case.

The 24-year-old on the train: the second lesson

This reminded me of an old story I keep coming back to. A 24-year-old man was riding a local train with his father. He kept pressing his face to the window, shouting with excitement: "Dad, look — the trees are running behind us!" A few minutes later: "Dad, the clouds are running with us!"

A passenger sitting beside them got irritated. He leaned over to the father and said, "Why don't you take your son to a doctor? Why is he behaving like a child at 24?"

The father replied quietly: "We are coming back from the doctor. My son was blind for 23 years. He just got his eyesight today."

The trees weren't running. The clouds weren't racing. A young man was simply seeing the world for the first time — and a stranger had already labelled him broken.

Why your brain wants to judge people quickly

As a Chartered Accountant turned AI educator who has trained 79,000+ students across 74+ courses, I work with data for a living. And the data on human judgement is brutal: we decide first, then look for evidence to back the decision. That's not a moral failure — it's how the brain saves energy.

• We see what we want to see.
• We listen to what we want to hear.
• We do what we already decided to do.
• We almost never ask for the other side of the story.

If I had been the one rushing to the hospital, I'd have driven exactly the same way — possibly faster. But put someone else in that car and suddenly I'm the traffic commissioner. That double standard is the whole problem.

The leader's habit: read the book, don't review the cover

A real leader does not judge a book by its cover. He picks the book up, opens it, gives it 20 pages, and only then forms an opinion. In conversations, that 20 pages looks like three questions:

• What's going on for you right now? — opens the door without accusing.
• Help me understand the why behind that. — invites the real reason.
• What would actually help here? — moves from judgement to support.

Three questions. Maybe 90 seconds of your time. That's the entire cost of not being wrong about another human being.

The money example: why some people don't spend

Here's one I see constantly in my coaching calls. A client looks at someone who has plenty of money but refuses to spend on themselves, and they decide that person is "stingy" or "weird about money." In reality, that person probably lived through a season so financially brutal that spending still feels unsafe — even today, with the bank account full.

Same behaviour, completely different story. Stingy is the cover. Survival is the book.

How to stop yourself in the moment

When you catch yourself about to judge people quickly, run this 4-step pause:

• Notice the verdict. The moment you think "what an idiot" or "how rude" — that's the signal.
• Name one missing fact. What don't you know about this person's last 24 hours?
• Flip the seat. If you were doing this exact thing, what would your reason be?
• Choose your response, not your reaction. Ask a question instead of issuing a verdict.

That four-step pause is the difference between a leader and a critic. It costs nothing. It changes everything — your marriage, your team, your clients, your patience with strangers on the road.

The promise worth making today

So let's promise this to ourselves: we are not going to judge anything or anybody based only on what we see. We will give the other side a chance to exist. The reckless driver might be rushing his mother to the ER. The childish man on the train might be seeing trees for the first time. The "rude" client might have just lost a deal an hour ago.

Everybody has their own reason for behaving the way they do — unique, hidden, and almost always more human than our first guess. We are nobody to pass judgement on a story we haven't read.

That's the lesson. One driver, one train, two reminders that the cover is never the book. Your next step today: the next time you feel a quick judgement rising about someone, pause for ten seconds and silently ask, "what might I be missing?" — then respond from that question instead of the verdict.