So I worked for the first time today in like more than two weeks.

And it got me thinking (I know, what a suprise) about how the roles we play in life directly effect how much value we give our opinions.

Or at least me.

Take my work, for example. Sometimes I am a "scoring leader" which means basically I spend hours either telling people on the phone how they are scoring wrong, or I am checking their scores to see if they are scoring wrong.

How do I do this? By scoring it myself. Yep, there's no magic, no fallback, no higher power, just my old little opinion.

And when I am a scoring leader, I have confidence in my scores. I can argue my position and feel good about the scores I'm giving.

But, dude, turn me into a lowly rater (what I did today) where you just sit there and listen to response after response and score them, and all of a sudden I'm miss dithering waffle-woman.

I mean, the same response I'd be like "yes, that's definitely a 2 because of language use and delivery issues" is now a response I'm calling MY scoring leader to argue about. And I'm swayed by their opinion.

What's the difference?

Nothing. Well, nothing but the title given my job for that day.

So it makes me wonder how much I disregard my own opinions in other areas of my life: as a mother talking to a teacher about my child, as a patient in a doctor's office, as a client on the phone with a financial advisor.

I'm not saying that those people don't have specialized knowledge that I do not have, but on the other hand, sometimes I know more about my own situation than they do...

How much should we listen to our "guts"?