Fear of failure is one of the most common obstacles to personal growth. It often serves as an excuse to avoid responsibility for healthy progress, keeping many stuck in situations that create stress and unhappiness, for themselves and others.

Yet humans don’t fear failure as much as they fear making a judgment call and getting it wrong. The discomfort of imperfection, the possibility of being incorrect, and the threat of humiliation are powerful forces, trapping many in stagnation but also offering the potential for transformation.

Failure is often a result of poor judgment or a lack of discernment. However, the only true failure to fear is the inability to learn from experience. Failure is feedback. It delivers insight into what not to do next time, just as success provides guidance on what to repeat. Moving beyond self-pity and regret allows failure to become a tool for progress, helping refine future judgment calls.

For survival’s sake, judgment doesn’t need to be considered a flaw. Judgment is a necessary function. Likewise, ego is not the enemy. You need both to thrive in the world. If you lived in a monastery, detached from external influence, judgment might be unnecessary, but most of us do not have that luxury. Even a mystic outside the monastery needs these tools to maintain a healthy and fulfilling life.

This is why you need your ego: Taming the ego is often romanticised, but its complete elimination is neither realistic nor beneficial. Ego serves a fundamental purpose. If you were entirely without it, you would struggle to:

• Establish a healthy sense of responsibility
• Define personal boundaries and respect those of others
• Maintain personal standards and integrity
• Make sound judgments

A healthy ego supports physical, emotional, and mental well-being. When those aspects are in balance, spiritual health follows naturally. However, when the ability to make appropriate judgments is diminished, whether through avoidance or misguided beliefs, disruptions occur:

• You take on responsibilities that aren’t yours or neglect your own.
• Boundaries become unclear—leaving you vulnerable or causing you to overstep with others.
• You fall into hypocrisy—either through personal double standards or by tolerating them in others.
• Ethical and perceptual errors lead to misjudgments, compounding the fear of failure.

There is a lesson to be gained from judgement. If judgment, or being judged, is a recurring challenge in your life, there is a lesson to learn from it. The archetype of judgment will remain present until its meaning is recognised and integrated.

Society often dismisses judgment as negativity, yet everything has a purpose—including being judgmental. According to the Oxford Dictionary, judgment means both “the ability to make considered decisions” and “having an overly critical viewpoint.” Learning to balance discernment with compassion is one way to do it.

There’s a fine line of judgment to walk. Being judgmental reveals as much about the judge as it does about the judged. What you put into the world may return to you tenfold, requiring you to walk in the shoes you’ve criticised. If that happens, at least you will develop deeper empathy. even if the lesson arrives the hard way.

Above all, judgment teaches personal boundaries, strengthens character assessment, and sharpens the ability to protect what matters most. It also urges a review of areas where perfectionism, control, and unrealistic expectations disrupt well-being. And maybe, the most overlooked lesson of judgment is this: experiencing criticism forces reflection on where discernment is lacking, where illusions have been mistaken for truth, where hypocrisy has taken hold, and where integrity has been compromised. Judgmental people naturally detect discrepancies, making them useful mirrors for deeper self-examination.

Judgment is a path to clarity. Neglected discernment creates chaos, conflict, and double standards. It’s worth exploring whether misalignment exists in relationships, work, family, community, finances, or creativity. When judgment is avoided entirely, self-sabotage becomes a risk, either harming personal integrity or exposing us to manipulation.

There is greater success when personal progress is embraced rather than feared. Managing judgment and ego effectively reduces stress, enhances clarity, all of which leads to greater fulfillment. The judge, the ego, and fear of failure, rather than being obstacles, are the very tools needed to create personal success.