What is the role of evaluation?

[00:00:00] **Aurooba Ahmed:** Well, hello! This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go!

[00:00:15] So I talked about evaluation a few episodes ago. For me, naturally, when I talk about evaluation, I think about care. How much we care about something, actually care, affects how we treat it in our life. The amount we care about something gives it a relative amount of power to influence our feelings, days, and thinking.

[00:00:41] I'm going to use a job as an easy example because many of us have one. And yes, even if you're self employed, I consider that a job. I've been self employed and I've been employed employed. I had a job in both cases. Very different jobs, that's for sure, but a job in both cases. So how much do you care about your job?

[00:01:03] And it's maybe important to mention that there are different ways to care about something. You don't have to care the utmost in order to do stellar work at your job, but it's also probably true that you might not do stellar work if you don't care a certain amount. So obviously, one would think, balance becomes necessary.

[00:01:23] But, balance is overrated. I've said that before and I'll say it again. Balance is like infinity. You can always get closer, but you'll never actually arrive. So, sometimes using that as a goal doesn't work. It can, but it doesn't always. You can also, in fact, care about your performance quite a bit and not care about your job a super high amount.

[00:01:45] There is a difference between caring about the thing and caring about how you perform or act in a thing. That's not always possible. I'm not sure I could care about my performance in my marriage if I didn't care about my marriage. But it's also true that people can care a lot about their marriage but take it for granted so much that they forget to evaluate their performance in marriage entirely.

[00:02:06] I've seen that story about a thousand times. The story of neglect. In fact, you know, evaluation is sometimes not about the thing, but about the level of care you give about the performance in the thing. Evaluation is maybe a timely check to see if you're caring enough at all, rather than if you should stop caring, which for some reason feels implicit in a term like evaluation, right?

[00:02:37] Uh, someone says, Oh, I'm going to evaluate you. And you suddenly think, Oh, they're going to try to figure out if I'm worthy or not. with the maybe understanding that the default is not rather than yes. I guess I don't really mean it that way here. Evaluation can be a really important tool to help you figure out where you're not caring enough rather than just where you may be caring too much.

[00:03:07] I like that. Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?