Are You Caring What Other People Think of You?
It feels good to get praise, yes?
It feels good to get approval for who you are, doesn’t it?
It feels good to get a “Good job, kiddo. You done good”, yes?
What about when you receive criticism or disapproval?
How does that feel? Usually, not so good.
Well, let’s just get off that merry-go-round of caring what other people think shall we?
If you care at all what someone thinks of you, it’ll feel good when they approve and it’ll sting when they don’t.
How hard do you work at controlling someone else’s perspective of you?
Feel the freedom in not needing anyone to like you.
Feel the freedom in not needing to please anyone.
Feel the freedom in being you for the sake of being you because you’re choosing it.
You may say you don’t care what other people think of you but if you’re being or doing anything to get a response from another – positive or negative – you care what other people think.
You’ll never feel free until you free yourself from trying to control how others perceive you.
You can’t control how anyone perceives you because you can’t control their perception.
You’ve tried it, haven’t you – to control someone else’s perspective of you? People ask you to be this way and that way, or that way without this way. You modify and shift, shape and twist yourself to please them only to discover that each one of them needs you to be a different way depending on the weather – or the planets.
This creates insecurity within you because you discover that you can please this one this time but maybe not the next time and while you may have pleased that one that time - you were never able to do it again. Ever. So you begin to think that you must be doing something wrong because you can’t control how people feel and think about you and you can never seem to get the consistent feedback you think you want.
Insecurities come from trying to please other people when they keep changing the rules and demanding different behaviors from you that you can't consistently fulfill.
You don’t have to modify yourself to change someone else’s critical view of you any more than you have to eat someone else’s breakfast so that they can feel full – that’s up to them. It’s up to them to change their perspective of you if they want to feel good – or full. Their perspective of you is their business, not yours.
Worth noting here - it’s not anyone else’s responsibility to be all of the conditional things you need them to be so that you can feel good either.
Ah-ha! Got you on that one, eh? You thought it wasn’t cool that they needed you to be different to please them, but you thought it was totally-good-and-right that they mold to accommodate you. Got it.
You’re not the reason why people feel the way they do and they’re not the reason you feel the way you do although you may all be trying very hard to convince each other of that. And you believe it because their disapproval is being directed at you, and when they do something you don’t like, your displeasure is pointed at them.
Feelings are the sole responsibility of the feeler.
A lot of people count on feeling good through the approval of others which leads us all to feeling misguided, mislead, distrustful, and confused.
That doesn’t mean you don’t appreciate someone’s praise, love, high-fives and hey-ho’s. It means – just don’t need it or rely on it for your sense of self-worth.
There’s no freedom in being what someone else wants you to be.
There’s no freedom in molding to what someone needs you to be.
There’s no freedom in demanding someone else to be what you need them to be.
There’s no freedom in trying to control someone else’s perspective of you.
Freedom is found when you can feel good about yourself with or without the approval of another.
Make your appreciation of self be a self-sustainable renewable resource.
No one’s approval of you can ever compare to the unlimited well of approval that you can find and feel for yourself. You can feel good about yourself and not one person needs to modify their opinion of you to feel that.