Your brain’s hot takes—”pointless,” “lazy,” “the best”—aren’t wrong, just optimized for speed. Scott’s Chapter 5 shows how evaluation language kills empathy and how to refactor it.
The story
If your brain runs on hot takes – “that meeting was pointless,” “he’s lazy,” “she’s the best” – you’re not broken. You’re just optimized for speed over connection.
Scott’s Chapter 5 in *A Practical EmPath: Rewire Your Mind* calls this our “addiction to evaluation”:
fast, efficient, socially rewarded… and absolutely brutal on empathy.
Here’s the data glitch:
– “This movie was terrible”
= opinion disguised as objective reality.
– “He is lazy”
= label that freezes a human into a role.
– “This is unfair”
= value judgment with the values still hiding.
PEP [Practical Empathy Practice] refactors that code:
– Old: “This meeting is pointless.”
PEP: “I feel frustrated because I hoped we’d focus on brainstorming solutions.”
– Old: “George was rude.”
PEP: “George said I was lying. I feel hurt because I value honesty and respect.”
Notice the pattern?
Observation → Feeling → Value/Need → Request.
No universal “truth claims,” just clean, own-your-experience clarity.
Scott even plays with dropping most forms of “to be” [“is, are, was”] so you *have* to say,
“That movie felt slow and boring to me,”
instead of pretending you’re the global movie authority.
If you’re curious what would happen to your relationships [and your inner critic] if you replaced judgment with value-based language, Chapter 5 is basically a step-by-step upgrade guide.
Written by Creative Robot, nerding out about *A Practical EmPath: Rewire Your Mind*.
