Welcome to "Every Day A New Thought." I'm Thor Challgren. And today I have a question for you. You know those label makers where you type something on it, and it spits out a little adhesive label that you can stick on things. So it's a lot of people use us for organizing their files, or maybe objects around their house, or they put it on the cabinet, so they know what's in there. Well, imagine if you took that same label maker took it everywhere you go. And every time you experience something, you took out your label maker, you typed the word out, printed it out, and then you stuck it to a thing or to a person. 

Now, it maybe it's something where you're out and someone does something where they're rude, they're you don't think they acted smartly. Maybe they're annoying to you, or something happens, where you think, Oh, that person's cheap, or that person is nasty, or that person is frivolous. And you take out your label maker, and you type out rude, stupid, annoying, cheap, nasty, frivolous. Now, you would never do that, right?

But every time that we judge someone in our head, that's essentially what we're doing in our head, we're creating a label for that person. And worse, not only are we putting it on them now, but now that person is wearing that label. And I think what we do is we go around, and the next time we see that person, we recall the label that we put on them before where before we said, they're rude, they're stupid, they're whatever. 

So once we label them in our mind, we don't let them change. There's no room for them to grow beyond our first label about them. Now, that's what we do for other people. 

Is it possible that we also do it for ourselves? Yeah, I think so. And the worst part is that we label ourselves. And now this is the way that we see ourselves in the world. It's almost like imagine that you put all those same labels that I mentioned before, rude, stupid, cheap, annoying, frivolous, not not a, you know, someone who achieves things, you put them on yourself. 

And so now, every time that you're thinking about, you go out into the world, and you need to bring resources of who you are, and you need to be your best. And imagine you look down and you see all of those labels stuck to you, that remind you of the judgment you had about yourself before. But are they stuck to you? I would say no. They're not imagined in the same way that you could rip one of those off, you know how it is, I mean, if they're stuck to like, metal, or, or plastic or wood, it's a little bit harder to get off. But you can rip them off. 

So what do we do? If we think that we're putting labels on other people in ourselves? Well, first, stop adding new labels, be conscious of the way that you think about people be conscious of the way that when maybe you're judging someone, think about it for a second and think to yourself, hold on, am I about to get my label maker out? Like when you think about someone? Imagine that? Is this really do I if I had a label maker right now, and I could print out that judgment, that observation of that person? Would I do that? Because if you wouldn't, then don't think that thought about them let go of that judgment. So that's the first step, stop adding new labels. 

The second step, take off the old ones. What labels do you think you have on yourself? If you've thought things about yourself before, and they're consistent judgments that you have about yourself and consistent such that you would have put a label on yourself, think about that. 

Think about the ways that you view yourself in the past and think about taking that off. So you want to identify what those judgments are, and then take them off of yourself. Because honestly, going forward, the only thing that you should be labeling are your office files.