Who Cares What People Think?

Caring about what people think can make you a very powerful person. Caring about what people think OF YOU can quickly take that power away.

This is the conclusion I came to tonight after some deep soul searching that has gone on inside of me for the last few weeks. My journey in trying to figure out who I really am and what I can do to best serve humanity has lead me to this very valuable truth that explains the walls I keep running into in  my life. 

Many times I have repeated this cycle: Get a great idea, work intensely on that idea, share it with a few people, get a plan together to share it with many, and then get scared and let it all go. I have been wondering for a long time why I do that. I see many other people do that same thing as well. 

Recently I have come to a place in my life where I am not willing to settle for this cycle any longer, so I have done some deep investigative work on myself to find the cause of this debilitating habit and rid myself of it! What I have come to is that I really do care about what people think and I try very hard to listen well and to be respectful of others' beliefs, opinions, ideas, etc. but where I get scared is that I start to worry too much about what they think OF ME or what they WILL think of me when I share my ideas, thoughts, opinions, etc. 

I am a wonderful listener and a great mentor because I am able to share great insight as long as the attention is on someone else. When the attention comes to me, I get pretty freaked out and tend to shut down. I start to feel like a victim or like a weak person who is being bullied into a corner. 

Something like this literally happened to me as a child, and apparently it has affected me ever since then. I have done very well relating to people until it came time for me to express myself. Then I think my mind went straight to being bullied and belittled, and somewhere inside I reminded myself that people would be unkind to me, that they would judge me harshly, that they would think my ideas were stupid, etc. Therefore the only course was to shut down, run away, hide, and not give them the chance to hurt me. 

As I have listened to others and cared about their thoughts and feelings, I have gained many friends and have been able to become a great leader at times in business and in my community. However, the moment I started to worry about what people were thinking OF ME, my momentum stopped. I sabotaged myself or just out right quit.

There is a famous old quote that says, "What other people think about me is none of my business." It is obviously time for me to embrace that one with open arms! And really, if you think about it logically, it is so strange that we worry so much about what others think of us. If indeed, we are all created equally, which I believe we are, then there are none of qualified to judge another. There are none of us more or less valuable than any other despite what ANYONE thinks.

It is especially ironic that what scares many of us from doing great things for others or from being our true selves around them is the fear of what they will think of us. Then others may form a bad opinion or impression of us because we don't share with them or reach out to them, or be our true selves around them. Furthermore, it is an epidemic! The more people I talk to, the more people I find who are afraid of what people will think of them! Sadly if left unchecked, this eventually turns to distrust, criticism, threat, contention, and hate. And when you feel this way about other people, you start to feel the same away about yourself because you are a human being too.

So, please...DO care about what people think. Just DON"T care so much about what they think OF YOU.