To successfully cope with the fast-paced lifestyle, learning how to not care about what others think has become a common need strived for personal independence and freedom to make decisions. Often people feel that other’s opinions and how much they weigh their own opinions create a hindrance in moving towards achieving their dreams and goals.
Feeling accepted is a human need that has helped in our evolution by imbibing the importance of being in a group and helping one another. Moreover, even in present times, the feedback, opinion or even the non-verbal signs of others help us to understand the underlying factors about how they perceive us and what they expect from us.
This need affects our decisions, such as the things we buy, actions we take, as well as our ways of communication, but sometimes when we take too much consideration of what others think, we may become dependent on others and lose our ability to experiment, innovate and live by our interests and values.
So, how do we care less about what others think? It’s crucial to make yourself a priority to care less about others and an effective hack to do this could be “Find the core wound and write a new story”. To do this,
- Begin meditation and try to find the core wound of not being liked by others and how did it make you feel at that time?
- Next, write your own story about times when you weren’t accepted by others and still worked your way out in a journal or on a sheet of paper. Keep that sheet of paper or journal always near you as a reminder that it’s okay if others aren’t very accepting about your decisions and that in the end it is your decision to take.
This is highly effective because it works on your subconscious belief that you need to get liked by others. Furthermore, to beat this overwhelming need of getting liked or approved by others, it’s also crucial to work on the root factor, that is, lack of clarity in our own choices and goals. To do this, ask yourself the following self-awareness questions,
- What do you like?
- What do you want?
- Are you making choices about your career and relationships because you want them or because you want to impress someone else?
- What is it that you are delaying to do because people near you are contradicting it and you don’t want to disappoint them?
“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.”
—Lao Tzu
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