Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Judgment Is the Disturbance
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Judgment is the Disturbance. Here we go. Two directors get the same phone call this morning. A flagship client is walking. Same lost revenue. Same board meeting coming up next week. One of them cannot sleep for a week. The other calls it a hard Tuesday and moves on to the next problem. Here's a quote that explains the difference. Marcus Aurelius wrote it to himself in a private notebook almost 2,000 years ago. He said, If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. Marcus Aurelius was not writing a leadership book. He was the emperor of Rome. This was a private note written only to himself. It came during two decades that included wars on multiple fronts, a plague that killed a large share of his own army, a betrayal by people close to him. He kept coming back to one discipline. The event itself does not do the damage. The judgment stacked on top of it does. And that judgment usually forms in seconds before anyone even notices it is happening. Picture those two directors again. Both received the exact same fact. A client is gone. But one of them let that fact travel almost instant instantly into a much bigger and much scarier story. This means the team failed. This means I failed. This means the board has lost confidence. None of those sentences were in the original phone call. The director built every one of them fast, out of habit, and then reacted to the story instead of the fact. The other director noticed the same instinct rising. She paused just long enough to ask what was actually said versus what she was assuming. That pause is the entire skill Marcus Aurelius is pointing at. Here's where people usually get this wrong. They hear the judgment is the problem and assume the lesson is to stop feeling anything. Stay calm no matter what. Perform composure. That is not what he means, and it would not be useful advice anyway. Feelings are going to show up regardless. The point is narrower than that. Between the thing that happens and the meaning a person assigns to it, there is a small gap. Almost nobody notices that gap exists, let alone uses it. Marcus Aurelius is not asking anyone to feel less. He is pointing at a moment most people sleepwalk straight through. Let's sit with this now, because so much of a leader's day arrives as an already alarming external thing, sometimes before there's time to think. A dashboard sends an alert. A machine-generated summary flags a risk. An AI tool reads a market move and hands over a conclusion, instantly, already leaning toward concern. Marcus Aurelius never had to sort a hostile rival from a well-meaning algorithm. But his point does not care about the source. Whatever hands you the alarm, human or otherwise, has done exactly one job. It delivered the fact, with a judgment already stapled to it. Deciding whether that judgment deserves the weight. that it is asking for was never that tool's job to begin with. It was always the leader's. So here's what I would suggest. The next time something disturbing lands on your desk, try separating it into two pieces before you respond to either one. First, write down the bare fact, as plainly as you can state it, and then second, write down your first interpretation of what that fact means. Look at both sentences side by side. Most of the time the first sentence is short and calm. The second sentence is the one doing all the damage. That gap between them is exactly where your response actually gets chosen instead of triggered. Let's go back to the two directors one more time. Neither one controlled whether the client left. Both of them, without knowing it, controlled everything that happened after. The event was never really the leadership test. The judgment riding along with it always was. Marcus Aurelius noticed that part centuries before anyone built a dashboard or an AI tool to deliver bad news this fast. It is still the only part that was ever actually yours to work with.