Originally Posted on The Coaching Tools Company as Beyond Judgement by Dr Steve Jeffs

Beyond Judgement

Rethinking what we mean, and what we lose, when we decide a word is bad.

“Why is judgement bad?”

It’s the kind of question that stops a room, not because it’s provocative, but because most of us have never thought to ask it. We’d been having a coffee conversation in our Pro Community, wandering into the territory of judgement the way good conversations do, and then Erwin — those of you in the mentor programme will recognise this — asked one of his trademark challenging questions. “Why is judgement bad?”

We thought we knew the answer. And that’s when it got interesting.

For many, judgement is a leadership competency. Something that separates effective decision-makers from ineffective ones, something you’d actively want to develop in a senior team. The word carries respect, not warning. And Erwin was right to name the gap, because while we as coaches felt we understood each other perfectly, that shared certainty was itself worth examining.

Erwin’s question changed the trajectory of our discussion. Here’s where we landed: the problem isn’t judgement itself: it’s the habit of over-judgement.

In life, most of us judge too readily, too automatically, and too finally. This habit is what coaching culture is rightly pushing back against. Think about how we learn to coach: we start by practicing to be quiet. Not because talking is bad, but because our natural inclination is to fill the space, to offer the answer, to share what we see. Until a coach can hold that impulse back, their speaking doesn’t land the way it could. When the silence comes first, the speech becomes more powerful. Something similar is true of judgement. The invitation isn’t to stop evaluating altogether. It’s to develop the capacity to pause before we crystallise, so that when discernment is needed, it’s conscious rather than reflexive.

So, let’s open the container, and dive a little deeper into what we mean by “Judgement”.

Non-judgement is one of coaching’s most profound gifts, and I don’t use that word lightly. When we create a conversation genuinely free from evaluation and positioning, when someone can feel, in their body, that they are not being assessed, not being measured, not being found wanting. Something shifts that rarely happens elsewhere. Clients hear themselves say things they haven’t said aloud before. They think in new ways, surprise themselves with what emerges, and explore the edges of their own experience without bracing for impact.

As coaches, we don’t just offer a non-judgemental space; we model a way of relating. We lead by example, and in doing so we give something more than comfort. We give permission. When a client experiences being met without judgement, they begin — often slowly, and often without knowing it — to extend that same quality to themselves. Our non-judgement becomes an invitation for their own. The voice of their harsh inner critic quietens a little. The self-scrutiny eases. They start to see themselves through a less condemning lens.

Here lies the real power of what we do. Not just a technique. A transmission.

This is an invitation for us to look more carefully at what we mean when we use a word. When we collapse too many different things into one, we often lose something we actually need.

“Judgement” is what you might call a container word. We use it as though we all know what’s inside. But let’s open it up and take a look.

Some of what’s in there is not just acceptable. It’s essential:

• Evaluation: the active, intelligent process of assessing a situation, building a mental picture of what’s happening, checking and revising as new information arrives.
• Interpretation: the meaning we make from what we observe.
• Discernment: the capacity to distinguish, to recognise patterns, to notice what matters.
• Assessment and consideration: the weighing of what we know against what we don’t.
• Reflection. Decision.

All good things.

A coach who has formed no reading of what’s happening isn’t a blank slate; they’re simply unaware of the readings they’re already carrying.

But there’s something else in the container too. This is the side of judgement that coaching culture rightly wants us to move away from:

• Verdict: the moment a provisional reading crystallises into a label. The moment something fluid and alive gets printed. Done. Fixed.
• Condemnation: to pass a sentence of disapproval; she’s resistant, he’s not ready, this one will never commit.
• Contempt, impatience, disgust: the emotional weight that often rides alongside the label, largely unseen.
• Punishment: a judge doesn’t just pass a verdict; the verdict carries consequence. In coaching, that consequence is the closing of our curiosity toward this person, the situation, or self.
• Commitment. Closure.

These words bring a very different energy.

One of the coaches in our discussion described this second cluster as a form of condemnation. When we judge in this way, we condemn the conversation, the topic, the client, and sometimes ourselves. The inquiry closes. We are no longer open to being surprised.

And this is what concerns me: not judgement as evaluation and a platform for further curiosity, but the moment the judgement sets. That crystallising move, when a working sense of someone becomes a fixed conclusion about them. This brings the end of curiosity.

When we’ve answered the question of who someone is, we stop asking it. We begin to find evidence that confirms what we’ve already decided. The conversation narrows without our noticing. We’re no longer genuinely open to being surprised by this person, because somewhere beneath our awareness, we’ve already decided what they are.

In coaching, this is a particularly significant loss. Our work lives in the question. We are not in the business of providing answers. We are in the business of deepening and extending the inquiry. When the inquiry closes in us, something the client needs disappears from the conversation, even if they can’t name what’s gone.

Here’s something worth noticing, and I want to say it gently. When we declare that “judgement is bad,” we have made a judgement. We’ve evaluated, reasoned our way through to a position, and landed somewhere with conviction. We’ve used exactly the kind of careful, considered discernment that we’re actually trying to protect. We judged judgement! The irony always makes me smile.

It’s also important to recognise the power of Erwin’s question. It was his curiosity that helped us surface the judgement we had quietly committed to, and this allowed us all to see beyond our initial position. That’s the move we’re pointing at. We cannot step outside the meaning-making process. We are always, in every moment of perception, constructing an interpretation. The question has never been whether we judge; it’s always been what kind of judgement we’re making, and how tightly we’re holding it.

As coaches, our identity can quietly attach itself to the label “non-judgemental coach.” When that happens, something shifts. We can start suppressing our evaluations rather than working to get beyond them. We may still be noticing what we notice, but then we push it down, rather than working with it consciously. The necessary challenge goes unspoken. The pattern we’re seeing stays unshared. And in a particular irony, the coaching becomes less useful, not more.

Suppressed judgement is not the same as getting beyond judgement.

Suppression hides the evaluation and protects our identity. Getting beyond judgement — which is what we’re really reaching for — means seeing the evaluation clearly, holding it as a working sense rather than a verdict, and staying curious about what we don’t yet know. This is possible because our readings aren’t facts; they’re constructions. Every perception we have is assembled from past experience, personal history, the mood of this particular morning, the faint echoes of people we’ve known before. When we remember this, our grip loosens. A judgement we’ve made becomes something we can revise rather than a truth we’re stuck inside. And this loosening is exactly where appreciative curiosity lives.

Appreciative curiosity isn’t the same as being relentlessly positive, or bypassing what’s difficult, or pretending the stuck place isn’t there. A client who’s struggling doesn’t need us to paper over that with enthusiasm. What they need — and what appreciative curiosity offers — is a coach who refuses to be stopped by the difficulty. A coach who keeps looking, who brings genuine interest to what is underneath, what is possible, and what this person can draw on that they may not be seeing right now.

There’s a move in appreciative curiosity that I find particularly powerful: it looks for what is working even when — especially when — what is most visible is everything that isn’t working. Not to ignore the difficulty, but to locate it in a larger landscape. In this situation, judgement in its crystallising form tends to fix our gaze on the problem and call it the whole picture. Appreciative curiosity keeps the frame wider. It helps us look beyond.

And here’s the thing about questions and answers that I come back to often. When we have an answer, we stop looking. When a client is holding a genuine question — one that hasn’t resolved yet, one they can’t stop turning over — they keep looking. We can leave clients with unsatisfied questions in the most generative sense, and that unsatisfied state is often where the real work happens. It is often this internal drive that allows them to find answers in places they would never normally think to look.

Judgement, in its verdict form, gives an answer. It therefore stops the thinking.  Appreciative curiosity helps us get beyond judgement by keeping the question open.

We don’t need to resolve the question of judgement. But we do need to be inspired by it to look beyond judgement. To notice the moment something crystallises and ask: is this a working sense, or have I stopped looking? To bring appreciative curiosity to the places where our gaze has narrowed. And to remember that the space we create — genuinely free of condemnation, genuinely open — isn’t just a gift to the client. It’s an invitation for them to offer themselves the same thing.

This, perhaps, is what non-judgement is really for.

With this, I invite us all to explore that rich space that sits Beyond Judgement.

Questions for Reflection

In your coaching, how do you distinguish between judgement as evaluation — a working picture that stays open — and judgement as verdict — a conclusion that closes the inquiry?

And how do you know, in the moment, which one you’re in?

If you enjoyed this article, you may also like:

• A Fresh Start for Coaches: The Missing Layer That Makes Transformation Stick by Dr Steve Jeffs
• The Neuroscience of Distraction Plus 2 Strategies to Find Focus by Dr. Irena O’Brien
• Beyond Active Listening: A New Coaching Technique “Heart to Heart” with Julie Johnson MCC