365 Secrets of Success

12. Don’t Be Afraid of What People Think About You

This is a ‘biggie’ for many people.

If fear of people’s opinions is something you currently suffer from, you are only too aware of its debilitating effect on your ability to achieve what you want.

In fact, fear of others’ opinions has such a profound affect, that in many instances whole communities suffer as a consequence, but I don’t want  to dwell on the consequences: you are probably aware of how ‘viral’ its effects are.

What then is the solution to being afraid of what other people might think about you?

Is it possible to give a sufficiently in-depth guide here, or am I only able to offer some pointers?

Certainly, it’s the latter, as I suspect if I could provide a succinct solution in less than 500 words that worked for everybody, many psychiatrists would be looking for a new career.

Before I continue, I would like to differentiate between being afraid and having a phobia…the latter is obviously far worse, and I won’t attempt to deal with it here. Also, as I’m not trained in psychiatry, I should give the obvious disclaimer here: please don’t take my thoughts as any kind of advice, or assume I am responsible for any subsequent actions that you might take consequent to reading this post.

OK, that out of the way, what steps have I taken in my personal life to eliminate fearing others’ opinions of me?

Firstly let me say that I am an open, empathetic personality-type, so I am aware of peoples’ thoughts and emotions.

There are no magic bullets, but I have practised the following:

• I don’t judge myself (that’s the biggest ‘biggie’ for many)
• I focus my mind to attempt to find the golden nuggets in people
• I try to affirm people where it seems appropriate for their encouragement
• I try to form opinions as slowly as I can, realising that my judgements will at best be a foggy representation of the other person’s complete personality, strengths and weaknesses

I’m not saying that I don’t ‘thin slice’ (see Malcom Gladwell’s excellent book entitled Blink if you want to know what that means), but in my initial impression, I always temper my opinion with the knowledge that people often transmit mixed messages.

If you look at the pattern of actions above, you’ll notice that much of what I have learned in not fearing others’ opinions of me, is actually related to how I view other people.

In other words, if you want to be free of being afraid of what other people think of you, start practising not judging others. It’s tremendously freeing.

Being unafraid of what others think of you obviously means that you are in a much stronger position to set new trends, to try out new things, to risk making mistakes, to do things in a completely different way to get completely different results….

The list goes on…

What is clear, is that if you have no fear, many things become possible.

As always – share your thoughts below.