Who Do You Think You Are, Missy? What Your Judgment Is Telling You.
I came to this solo trip determined to travel independently. No tour groups. No following somebody around with a little sign. No letting someone else tell me where to go or what to see. I was going to prove that I could do this my way.
Then Romania started poking holes in that plan. A couple of unexpected encounters made me realize that maybe my strong opinions about how people “should” travel were telling me more about myself than they were about anyone else.
That got me thinking about judgment, how sneaky it can be, and how laughter can help us get off our high horse when we catch ourselves doing it.
You’ll hear about:
- What solo travel has taught me about independence and openness
- Why your judgments about other people might actually be telling you something about yourself
- How to recognize when a preference has turned into a judgment
- Using laughter to catch yourself, lighten up, and get unstuck
- Why being willing to try something different can open up experiences you never expected
Episode Timestamps
- [00:27] Hello from Tbilisi, Georgia!
- [01:15] What it took to get here
- [02:46] Today’s topic: Judgment
- [03:19] My travel rules – my way or the highway
- [05:24] Two encounters that shifted my perspective
- [10:42] The big reveal: judgment is information about you, not the other person
- [11:29] The grad school blow-up 25 years ago that launched this lesson
- [13:14] Unpacking my travel judgement
- [15:54] Doing it different for the next three months
- [18:03] Bringing in the laughter – Missy, bike boy, and travel friends make it so much better!
- [21:94] Your invitation
Links and Resources Mentioned
- Laughter Revolution Digest, Marla’s newsletter, out every two weeks: marlasimlett.com
- Email Marla directly: [email protected]
- Follow along on Instagram and Facebook for travel reels
If this episode hit home, hit subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, so you never miss an episode. And if you want more of my travel adventures, and what I am learning and laughing about on the road, subscribe to my Laughter Revolution Digest at marlasimlett.com. It lands in your inbox every couple of weeks, judgment-free
Full Transcript
Welcome to Laughter Revolution. I’m your host, Marla Simlett, and I called season one Where Laughter, Learning, and Luggage Collide because I’m talking about what I’m learning and laughing about on my six-month solo trip across the world.
So I am currently in Tbilisi, Georgia. For anyone who doesn’t know, Georgia is a little country that is bordered by Russia at the top, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Turkey, and then the Black Sea on the west coast.
Tiny little place. A little bit smaller than New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, if you know your Canadian geography. And four million people. And somewhere that I’ve wanted to come for probably 15 years. When my husband Michel and I were in Turkey, there was a man who was going to Georgia, and it kind of piqued my interest.
Since then, I’ve always wanted to come. Michel and I were gonna come in 2020. We all know what happened in 2020. And so, finally getting here is kind of a dream come true.
But it took some mental machinations to get here for me because, for the first three months of my trip, I was, “Am I gonna go to Georgia? Am I not gonna go to Georgia? Is it safe to go to Georgia? Am I gonna be okay in Georgia? Is it okay for me to go to Georgia? I don’t know if I want to go to Georgia.” Really a lot of anxiety and fear, and me letting them get the best of me sometimes. But in the end, because my mission right now is to feel the fear and do it anyway and stop letting these anxieties keep me stuck, I arrived about three days ago.
And so far, I just love it. Tbilisi is a cool little city. Well, not little. 1.5 million people. But just lots of cool architecture, and the people seem really friendly, lots of great parks and a little bit gritty, which I like. So I’m looking forward to seeing what the rest of the country holds.
Just as an aside, if you’re interested in hearing more about my mental machinations, ’cause some people love that stuff, I do have a Laughter Revolution Digest, and I’m talking more in my latest edition of that about some of the ways that fear has been coming up for me and how I’m using laughter and some good old talking to to get myself in line.
Those digests are lots of fun. They come out every two weeks, and I’m sharing lots of pictures from my trips. So if you’re interested, you can go to marlasimlett.com, my website, and subscribe there. And you can get those in your inbox every couple of weeks.
Onto the topic of today though, which is judgment.
Dun, dun, dun.
Now, we all are judgmental in some way or another, and even the best of us trying not to be judgmental, our world is judgmental, our society is judgmental. And I have been getting stuck a little bit in judgment, and it’s one of the things that I’m really learning about and trying to use laughter to get unstuck from.
So here’s where this has started. Ever since I decided that I wanted to travel in general, I had this image in my mind of what travelling looked like, and I don’t even know where it came from. When I was a teenager, when I was in my 20s, travelling wasn’t even a thing that was on the radar. My dad traveled a lot with the Air Force, but our family never really traveled anywhere for vacations other than kind of local things. My friends didn’t travel a lot.
But for some reason, I had this idea of what travelling, real travelling, the travelling that I wanted to do had to look like, is I had to do it by myself. I had to have it be very independent and not relying on, you know, travel groups or tour groups or having people guide me around. It had to be independent and without fear and without anxiety, and I just had to go.
I’ve done a little bit of solo travel kind of in Canada, and I’ve even done some overseas travel. But typically, that was at an all-inclusive where it felt a little safe and secure and with a GAP Adventures tour, back about 20 years ago.
And even though some people would say, “Oh my God, that’s really cool,” for me, it was just never enough. And so I’m doing my what I imagine travelling should be like for me right now. And for the past three months, I’ve been doing that. I am, you know, on my own. I’m planning everything out myself. I’m finding my way around by myself. I am exploring by myself. I’m using public transit. I’m out, you know, connecting with the locals and people and learning their culture and a little bit of their language, and it feels really good. But there’s always a but.
I’m gonna backtrack a little bit because in Romania a couple months ago…
I’m actually gonna backtrack even further than that.
I have a belief that things happen in your life to give you information. And so when I see coincidences or what people would call coincidences coming up, I always look to see where the connection is and where the learning is for me.
So I was in Romania before Georgia, and this was probably about three weeks ago. And I was in a coffee shop and trying to order a Canadiano ’cause I’m trying to shift that mindset and that vernacular around the world from Americano to Canadiano. And that had me connect with a guy who was standing there with his two friends, and he was from Canada. I think he was from Calgary.
The three of us, the four of us, just ended up chatting and having a good talk. And they subscribe to a philosophy that believes that… It’s a very mathematical-based philosophy, and it believes that your name has a mathematical meaning. And you are kind of stuck in the way that you think in your perspectives and how you can live out your life, like what your kind of destiny will be based on the numbers of your name. And so they actually will change their name to become the numbers of what they wanna be and who they wanna be and where they wanna go in their lives.
That’s a little bit deterministic for my belief, but it was really interesting talking to them and it made me think a little bit. You know, I like my name Marla, and they were… When they kind of read my name and what it meant mathematically, it was pretty right on except for the procrastination part. I’m not a huge procrastinator. But it was really interesting, so it made me think. Said goodbye to them, “Nice to see you.”
Walking along. About an hour later, I was sitting in a park, and this woman came and sat down beside me, a Romanian woman. Her name was Maria. And we started chatting. And it seemed like we had a lot in common. It seemed like we had the same kind of philosophy of looking for positivity, looking for happiness, making the most of things.
And yet everything that I said, she countered with something different and wasn’t quite buying into kind of what I was saying or questioning everything I was saying. And quite frankly, it was a little bit annoying. And I had to check myself, like, “Okay, why is this so annoying to you? Why is this bothering you so much?” ‘Cause it was uncomfortable because, you know, we spend our lives typically around people who believe in how we believe or think how we think. And if they don’t, typically people will go along if it’s just somebody casually. But she was really challenging me.
With those two experiences together, I had to say, “Okay, there’s something here, Marla, that you’re needing to learn about your perspective and when you’re holding on so tight to your perspective, what that means for you and what that might be limiting you to.”
I put that in the percolator to see where that was gonna land, and where it has landed is recognizing… So as I was just moving into the second half of this trip, I was feeling a little bit… You know, I’ve seen some amazing things. I’ve met amazing people. I’ve… Ugh, I look back at the pictures ’cause three months seems so long ago. Like, oh my God, I was in Scotland three months ago. It seems like forever ’cause I’ve done so much.
But I realize I might be… I was feeling like I’m limiting myself a little bit. Like, maybe there’s experiences that I’m not having because I’m so stuck on this idea of what travel has to look like. So I realized there was the lesson.
I told you all the backstory, now I’m telling you about kind of where I’m stuck. And getting back to judgment because I recognize that I have these judgments about people who perhaps don’t travel the way that I think, that I think people should travel, that I think I should travel. I mean, I know everybody’s not gonna travel the way I travel and they don’t want to, and that doesn’t mean they’re wrong or I’m right, or they’re bad or I’m good.
It’s just everybody is different. But some people want, you know, their trip completely planned by somebody else and they just wanna follow A, B, C, D and do it. Other people never wanna ride on public transit or wanna stay in really nice hotels, and want everything very curated and don’t really wanna get into the culture, and that’s great.
Everybody has a different experience, so why am I so judgmental about that? And I realize saying that I’m judgmental, I’m a little bit uncomfortable with that ’cause we don’t want to say that we’re judgmental. Like, it sounds like we’re bad people. And so I really want to… I mean, in some ways it sounds like I’m being unfair to people, and I’m probably not right about any of the reasons that come up in my head about why they would do that. Oh, they’re scared, they’re afraid, they don’t really… Like, whatever it is, they’re not right ’cause I don’t know these people at all. So I really try to come into that with gentleness because what it is for me is information.
I’m gonna put that out to you to think about. Any time you have a judgment about how somebody is doing something, it’s about you.
Dun, dun, dun.
I’m gonna let that sit there for a minute. That’s right. It’s about you and something that you are afraid of or ashamed of or have been taught was wrong. It’s not about that person at all, and what it is is information that you can use.
So I’m gonna go back again, and this is going back, like, God, 25 years now, to one of my first classes when I was in my master’s program for counseling psychology.
And we were in this class, and we were in a circle, and we’re talking about why we were in the master’s program. And it had two streams, so one stream you could do a thesis, and another stream you didn’t have to do a thesis, and you ended up with the same degree, something slightly different with it.
When it came my turn, I talked about how I’d always wanted to be a counselor, that I was really excited about the program, and I was doing the thesis route because for me it would feel like a cop-out if I didn’t. It would feel like I was just scared that I didn’t think I could do it. I wasn’t smart enough to do it, or I wasn’t disciplined enough to do it, and so I was pushing myself.
The woman sitting across from me, I could see her reaction as I was talking, and when it came to her time, she lashed out at me a little bit. She’s like, “I really resent that because it’s not a cop-out to be taking the other route. I’m taking the other route, and I’ve got kids to look after. I’ve got a job that I’m doing.
I’ve got…” And I was just like, “Oh my God, that’s not…” And I started apologizing, and the woman sitting beside me, this girl, younger than me, but she was so wise, her name was Joss, and she said, “Wait a minute, like she wasn’t talking about you. She was talking about herself. Like that’s got nothing to do with you.”
And the professor, because it was a group process class, processed that through, and it was the first time I kind of realized, oh, like she was hearing that as a judgment because she was judging herself.
Lesson in there.
So information, when you’re judging someone, it’s information about yourself, somewhere that you need to heal or I would think at least explore.
If you’re getting this information, why wouldn’t you use it? So when I started thinking about it, what was it about me and travel? Like, I don’t even know why this image of how I need to travel had come up, but what was it about that? So travelling without other people, without support, without a lot of security, what was that about for me?
And so first, I mean, practically, I’m an independent person. I wanna do things at my own speed, which can often be a little bit faster than other people wanna do it. I wanna see the things I wanna see. I don’t wanna feel restricted. And, in some ways, I’m a bit of a loner. I don’t do group activities in sports. I like to kinda go off by myself and I love to connect with people. It’s one of the my favorite things about travel, but I wanna do it on my own terms.
But as I dug a little deeper into that, it was similar to what it was with my master’s program about doing a thesis. I needed to prove to myself that I could get over the fear that I had about travelling by myself: that I was gonna get lost, that I was gonna get hurt, that I was gonna not know how to manage myself, that I was gonna have this deep-seated loneliness that was going… And I feel that emotion when I said about that loneliness… that that was going to be coming up and really be hard to manage and hard to deal with. So there was that fear that I wanted to push myself to get over.
There was also, I talked about my dad travelling a lot. My dad was also a very judgmental man, and not gonna be one who was gonna look at why he was being so judgmental. But I think I was holding onto some of that judgment that my dad has. A good funny example of that, and I talk about it in an earlier episode. My dad’s thing was, “You know, if you’re travelling, all you need is your toothbrush and an extra pair of underwear,” and I have had packing shame my whole life. I talked about a whole episode about unpacking my baggage with luggage and trying to realize that it doesn’t matter how much I bring or how much I don’t bring, and nobody’s judging me. Nobody cares. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so I was holding onto some of my dad’s judgment.
And again, I realized that that may be… It’s something I can let go of. I’ve proved to myself that I can travel the way that I’d want to travel, and I love it. I’ve had such a good time, and enjoy my own company, and enjoy being on my own.
But I’ve also really enjoyed the times that I’ve met people and been able to connect with them.
So this next three months, let’s get to the gist of it. I’m doing something different. I’m pushing myself to be more… To be less independent, I think. To be a little more open to other things.
What that looks like right now, so I arrived into Tbilisi on Sunday, and I booked myself into a walking tour. And one of the things I’ve always had a bit of a judgment about is the person with the sign, and they’re walking around, and people are following them, and they’re telling them the story, and you have to stand there and wait and… But why? Why wouldn’t you get that information if it’s available?
So I joined, a lot of the cities in the world, as you may know, have free walking tours, and I joined one, and there was 50 people, and we followed Annie around, our tour guide, who was great. And, you know, I was still able to kind of wander around and do what I wanted, but I was also getting some information, and I met some really cool people.
I met a guy, Daniel, from Montreal, and I met Morgan from Colorado, and we ended up hanging out for the rest of the afternoon and really had a great time. So I did that. I will probably do a hiking tour when I get up into the mountains, partly because after my bear scare, a couple weeks ago, I’m not doing any hiking on my own.
Although, as an aside, apparently the bears in Georgia are not quite as aggressive as the bears in Romania. I’m imagining they’re like these great big brown teddy bears that you could just kinda sit beside in the mountain, maybe have a teddy bear picnic. That might not happen, but I’m not as nervous about bears.
But I do… I mean, it’s just good common sense to hike with other people, especially if you’re gonna do some more major hikes. So I’ll probably join a hiking group. When I get to Laos, I’ve decided that I’m going to do a volunteer experience, where I’ll go into a school and teach English for a week or two.
So just trying to do something different with the rest of the trip and see how that feels. And maybe I’m gonna love it, and maybe I’m gonna decide that it’s not for me, but at least I’m opening up that space for it.
Where does laughter come in with that? Because you know I’m all about laughter. The reason I built this podcast and my business as a professional speaker and all of the things I do is because I deeply, truly believe that, while laughter can’t fix everything, it can certainly make it better. Because it lowers your defenses, it shifts you into this down-regulated nervous system mode that is gonna allow you to get more oxygen to your brain from a practical perspective so that you can be more open, you can think more clearly, and it brings in all of those endorphins and those feel-good hormones. Why would you not want that?
I am using laughter to help me basically get over myself, because I feel like I’m up on this pedestal of Marla needs to travel by herself and she’s so fancy that way, even though nowhere I’m staying is fancy. This may look fancy. Apparently, the KGB used to stay here. That’s another story altogether. You know, maybe I’ll talk about that in my latest digest. But getting off my high horse about how I wanna travel and being open to other things. So when I feel myself, that judgment coming in about, oh, I don’t wanna be in a tour group like that, I don’t wanna do this, just saying to myself like, “Who the hell do you think you are, Missy?”
I love it when I call myself Missy.
“What makes you think that’s not as good as what you’re doing? You’re wandering around by yourself probably missing half of the things that you could be seeing that you would love.” And just bringing laughter into that, bringing some jokes, making fun of myself a little bit, always in a gentle, loving way, because I’m just learnin’, just learnin’ to be different in this different way.
And I mean, the other place laughter comes in is that, yes, I laugh by myself a lot. Things delight me, and I am not above laughing out loud at things that I see are funny. I’ll tell you this quick story. It made me laugh yesterday.
So the streets, the traffic is a little crazy in Tbilisi and in Georgia in general, I think. But I was walking up the street yesterday, and it was a really busy street, and this kid comes bombing up the road. He was only probably, you know, 11, and he’s on his bike, and he’s going over to the side, and he’s kicking out his legs, and he’s just having the best time, and there’s cars behind him, like, backed up for two blocks. He doesn’t care. And the guy, the car behind him started honking his horn, and this kid just starts ringing his bell in rebellion, and it just sounded so funny, and he was having so much fun. I laughed out loud. It was hilarious.
Anyway, that’s a little story, but my point being, I’m not above laughing with myself, but God, it’s so much more fun to laugh with other people. And when I spent the afternoon yesterday with Morgan and Daniel, we laughed a lot. And it’s just joyful, you know? And it just gave me that feeling of joy and happiness, and so anything that was negative that might have been going on was fixed by that yesterday.
That’s really all I want to talk about today. I shared with you my judgment. I invite you to think to yourself and know what judgment feels like to start with, and the biggest tell for me is when I’m saying that I’m better than somebody else, or I can’t understand why somebody’s not doing something in a certain way. That’s a judgment.
Turning that mirror back on yourself and saying, “Okey dokey, what’s that telling me about myself?” And then seeing where maybe need to shift a little bit. Change that perspective. We don’t need to change our name necessarily to be different.
I think I have a true belief that everybody in the world wants to be the best that they can be, they wanna be happy, they wanna be successful, and they wanna feel like they belong. And the best way to do that is to be open-minded and happy and joyful and positive. And so shifting your perspective and helping laughter to do that, that’s gonna help.
So that’s all for today. Thanks for joining me. I’m really excited to be into the 11th episode and having more and more followers all the time.
Let me know if there’s anything you want me to talk about or if you have any questions, or things that you’re laughing about. I’d love to hear about it. I’d love to connect.
You can connect with me through my email, [email protected]. You can connect with me on Instagram and Facebook. I’m posting reels there every couple of days of some of the things I’m seeing and learning and laughing about on my travels.
If you know you wanna hear more of these podcast episodes, you can also follow me wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. Maybe where you are right now. Just hit that subscribe button or that follow button, and you’ll get an update every time a new episode drops, every other Thursday.
So thanks for being here. Thanks for listening in. I hope you’re all having wonder-filled days and lives, and I will see you next time. Until then, remember, laugh more, be well, become your greatest you.
