Grow with Soul: Episode 126 - How to Stop Caring What Other People Think
I wanted to talk about this topic today because it’s a common barrier to doing what you want with your life: other people. It doesn’t matter how certain you are about what you want and where you want to go, other people always have the potential to derail or deflate your plans; and when you’re not certain, not confident, then they can stop you from even considering it. As with so much, this is a difficult topic to generalise, depending as it does on our own relationships with others, our personalities, our tics in relating and how we’ve been socialised. But my hope with this episode is to draw attention to this barrier, suggest a few tools, so that you may feel slightly more equipped when you come up against it.
What I talk about in this episode:
Explaining what you do to real-life acquaintances
The conflicting intensity and anonymity of people on the internet
Having resilience and self-sourcing and stubbornness to be doing what you’re doing in spite of what unsupportive friends and family might say
Grow with Soul: Episode 125 - How to Rebuild Confidence with Cait Flanders
Read the episode transcript:
I wanted to talk about this topic today because it’s a common barrier to doing what you want with your life: other people. It doesn’t matter how certain you are about what you want and where you want to go, other people always have the potential to derail or deflate your plans; and when you’re not certain, not confident, then they can stop you from even considering it. As with so much, this is a difficult topic to generalise, depending as it does on our own relationships with others, our personalities, our tics in relating and how we’ve been socialised. But my hope with this episode is to draw attention to this barrier, suggest a few tools, so that you may feel slightly more equipped when you come up against it.
First of all, I’m dividing Other People up into categories: Real Life Acquaintances, People On The Internet, and Family and Friends. As I say those out loud you may have a bodily reaction to one or another of them: for some, the support of family and friends feels unconditional but their wider real life circle of colleagues and friends of uncles casts a shadow over their expression; for others they feel utterly confident talking with people on the internet but would die if their sister read any of it. Getting specific is the first part of dealing with something.
Real Life Acquaintances
The sassy part of me wants to say “aka, people who literally don’t matter”, but let’s break it down. Real Life Acquaintances are the background actors and minor roles in the movie of your life - they’re your hairdresser, your neighbours, friends of friends of friends, the guy in the post office. They’re the people you’d nod or say hello to in the supermarket, but you wouldn’t go for coffee with. Perhaps, sometimes, they’re also strangers.
Real Life Acquaintances affect us because we play a specific, two-dimensional role in each other’s lives - it’s not an important one, but it’s one that keeps everything ticking along, everything “normal”. They don’t understand who we are as individuals, they understand us as a symbol, a representation of something. For example, to the friend of a friend you might be a representation of success, to your neighbours the representation of a “nice family”, to the post office guy a “nice polite lady”. From those personas there is created a finely tuned web of social understanding that keeps everything in equilibrium. The reason you don’t want to disrupt that is the same reason we don’t answer “how are you?” with anything other than “fine thanks, you?”
With Real Life Acquaintances, it’s not the individuals we’re afraid of upsetting - it’s this social equilibrium. To be ourselves, rather than the representation of what we are, would not disturb the acquaintances so much as the whole web. Like I said at the beginning, these people don’t matter because just as much as you’re not an individual to them, they’re not an individual to you. They are also some representation. They’re not a feeling human with dreams to whom you would go for advice or exchange any more than pleasantries with. It just doesn’t matter. So what do you do when something doesn’t matter?
Personally, my tendency is to keep up the social web by lying. For example, I know if a hairdresser asks me what I do and I tell the truth they are going to grasp that as a point of difference and it’s going to be a whole thing of answering questions, justifying my choices and my work, trying to explain something to someone without frame of reference for it. So instead I say I do freelance marketing and that’s suitably professional to hold up the web and suitably boring to not invite further questions and we move on to something else. The same with friends of friends; although I don’t lie I withhold truths and don’t go into detail because it just doesn’t matter that they understand every facet of what I do and what I want. Perhaps there’s an argument that I’m missing out on potential connection by doing this, but I personally feel like I have plenty of people in the other categories to connect in this way on - I am a depth not breadth kinda person. And for me, the protection of my energy and work and choices without having to continually explain them is simply more important.
That’s the key with this group - find what you need to protect those things, to not self-betray. There are very few consequences to whatever you decide to do because, frankly, you are just not that important to this group. They will move on, busy being the main character in their own movie, so do what you need to continue being yours.
People On The Internet
This category we could break down again into the nice people that we know and the colleagues and the scary anonymous trolls. I want to start with the trolls first because I know they seem to be a constant lurking threat for people, or even the more tame version of “people not liking it” - “it” being whatever you produce or post. The fear of being confronted about something stops people being their true selves. But the truth is, in the four years I’ve been doing this, existing online and working with hundreds of people, I have never known anyone who’s been trolled. Even lightly. Because generally, none of us are high profile enough to garner that kind of attention and if people don’t like what you do they do the same as you when you don’t like it - they ignore it. So if fear of trolls is a reason you’re not posting what you want, I’d say you need to find a better reason.
Otherwise, People On The Internet are the people we interact with, we “Instagram know”, the people who have read about our wildest dreams but have never seen our legs. We might not know their real names, we might live in different continents, and yet they are a real and powerful force in our lives. More than the Real Life Acquaintances, we trust their judgement, respect their opinions, care about them as people - and care what they think of us.
As much as we are individualised on the internet, we are also very much in boxes - need I say more than “niche” to evoke that feeling. The way that algorithms and human brains work is to categorise things, and often we find ourselves in these boxes where people expect a certain kind of content, behaviour, viewpoint and service from you. And when you want to do something different to the definitions of that box, move to a new box, or just not exist in a box, you find yourself worrying about what People On The Internet will think.
A refrain I have in my head was “everyone wants me to x” - the value of x changes depending on what particular growth edge I’m coming up against, what change I’m wanting to make. The implication here is that if I don’t do what “everyone” wants, then they won’t be interested anymore and I won’t make any money and I’ll have to get a job and maybe that means moving and then on and on down the slippery mental slope. This is, however, helping to isolate the fear. For me, it’s not a fear of judgment, or of confrontation, or of copycats - it’s a fear of disinterest. And now I know what it is, I can start to deal with it, using logic, using what I know, talking myself round.
The impulse is often to try to “just not care”, which I’m sure is as easy as trying to “just not breathe”. People On The Internet are this strange mix of being intensely personal while intensely anonymous, there is so much that can be read in between messages and posts that maybe exists or doesn’t. It can leave us chasing our tails, second guessing. Added into that is the fact that, often, we depend on People On The Internet for our livelihoods as well as for community, which brings any mindset stuff around scarcity and confidence to the party too. No wonder you care so much about what these people think. But often your fears around this are a symptom, an expression, of a more deeply rooted fear - isolate that and the symptoms will calm.
Friends and Family
And here we come to the thorny one. Those people in your real life who are most intimately connected to you. Again here we can have various sub-categories - supportive friends and family, well-meaning but unhelpful friends and family, unsupportive or estranged family and frenemies. Our reactions to Friends and Family are different in each.
I don’t think I need to spend much time on the supportive ones because they’re unlikely to be a barrier for you - suffice to say, sometimes even the most supportive people can’t really get it, and just like with Real Life Acquaintances you may need to protect the energy from over-explanation. Somebody genuinely supporting you will be fine about that.
So let’s move on to well meaning but unhelpful. This is where they tell you about so-and-so’s daughter who also has her own business and does Instagram, have you thought about doing Instagram? Where they continually ask if you’re ok for money and remember to make sure you have more coming in than going out. Where they give their opinion even though they’re not your target customer or ask how it’s going and, unlike truly supportive people, want an involved, board-level report.
Depending on who you are, these people may make you feel irritated, angry, despondent, numb. But either way, they inspire you to move focus away from the work you’re doing and the life you’re building and toward them and your emotion. What you need here is a boundary - and as Cait said to me off-air last week, a boundary is just a communication tool. This can be done explicitly - “I’m not going to share all the ins and outs with you” - or implicitly by changing subjects and holding things back from that person. It also takes an internal boundary of, in Glennon Doyle’s parlance, not letting them over the bridge. If their worries about money throw you off course, don’t let them in - I mentally think “that’s good advice for you but not for me, I’m going to carry on”, while mm-hmming out loud and moving the subject along. I think the trouble with these people is that they are the ones you’ve generally looked to for how to be in the world, and when you find yourself at odds with their opinion it can make you feel you’re doing something wrong. This is where the self-trust muscle needs to kick in.
Now let’s move to the outright unsupportive friends and family. I am thankful to not have much experience in this area, but I know whatever they’re saying about you is wrong, because you’re here. I also know, because you’re here, you have resilience and self-sourcing and stubbornness to be doing it in spite of what they say. You may not have everything you want (ie, a support system) but you do have everything you need within you. You’ve probably been dealing with their unsupportiveness for most of your life, so you know how to deal with that. Don’t hurt yourself with the disappointment of expectations you know can’t be met. Look inside at everything you have - talent, tenacity, belief, strength, tenderness - and use that to make yourself an amazing life.