Not Caring About What Others Think

People ask me all the time how they can get out of the habit of caring what others think.  I have said before that if you are worried about what others think of you, your Magic can not be your own.  You are letting others control your Magic.  It does not matter if you are worried about what strangers think or worried about what people you know think, you need to stop.  This post will show you how.  

First you need to get over yourself.  You are the star of your movie, but in everyone else movie you are an extra in the background.  When you look at yourself in the mirror you notice every last little flaw and think everyone else does too.  Most people are so hung up on themselves that they don’t give a damn about your pimple, mole or anything else you don’t like about yourself.  Pay attention to how you act towards yourself with what you think are your flaws. Everyone else is trying to hide their own flaws so much that they could care less about yours.   

Get the idea of cool out of your head.  Cool is relative.  What is cool to you may not be cool to others.  Take a look at yourself.  Who are you trying to be?  Whatever your character, do something different. Dress different.  If you are shy, be outgoing.  If you are talkative, be quiet.  Anything different.  Doing that gets you out of the mindset that you have to live up to an image.  Doing something you don’t normally do is a way to get you out of your comfort zone.  

Why do we allow people to have so much control over the way we live our lives?  Every person is doing it.  Some do it more than others.  To see how much its controlling you, observe yourself out in public.  If you are judging people, then you are worried about how others see you and what they think of you.   Catch yourself judging others.  Change it to “let them be”.   Embrace the differences of others and you will change the narrative in your head that others embrace you too.  

Learn to laugh at what you think others are judging you about.  When I first woke up I was worried how other people perceived me as crazy because of my thoughts.   I clammed up around others and wouldn’t speak my mind because people were calling me weird and a satanist.  I learned to embrace my mind and starting laughing at it.  When people want to talk to me about deep things I respond with “Its dark in there.  Are you sure you are ready for this?”  When I get a cup of coffee and someone asks me what I want in it, I tell them “black like my soul”.  I even tell people, “Im the devil himself”.  By embracing it and laughing at it, you will share it with others.  When you do this it makes everyone else feel comfortable too.  Be fun and playful with what you think are your faults.  

Now Im going to tell you where the core of worrying about what others think comes from.  Like most everything else its our childhood.  You were condition as a child to seek approval.  As a child you must rely on your parents or whoever is raising you for everything.  Approval is like food or oxygen for child.  If you didn’t get approval from your parents, subconsciously you think you might die.  So you think you have to get approval at all costs. It goes with you at school where you have to get approval from all the teachers and other kids and sticks with you in adulthood.  We never out grow the need for approval.  We continually chase this obsession for approval.  Consciously you know you can live without other peoples approval, but subconsciously you think it will bring you harm.   Until you dive into this core need for approval it will be your default mode.  

You develop this need for approval for survival.  You block experiences out in your mind that had a major roll in creating your inauthentic self.  Look around, we are all closed off and anxious.  No one is really expressing themselves.  All because we depend on people approving of us.  Im not telling you to just not care about anyone or anything and let yourself go.  Im telling to to stop depending on the approval of others.  It does not matter what you say or do, someone will find it offensive.  That is the PC culture we live in.  All that the PC culture does is make everyone walk around anxious and stifled.  Everyone has become a politician.  What do politicians do?  They hide everything and lie.  

You are hiding things that you have suppressed since being a child.  All because your parents or anyone helping raise you said it was bad.  We all need rules and guidelines, but as a kid you had a very limited perspective.  Lets just say that as a kid you questioned god.  Your parents probably scolded you.  As a kid not getting this approval you suppressed any thought of questioning god or anything else for that matter.  Questioning equals bad, going along with other peoples thoughts equals good.  This is the core of why so many people will not question anyone they see as an authority figure and why they blindly go along.  If it conflicts with the opinions of the masses they literally feel like they are going to die.  

We have so much suppressed in us that we hate or don’t like.  We live our life to reinforce anything we suppress.  We inflate our egos all to hide everything we hate about ourselves that is hidden in the subconscious.  We think that if we inflate our ego with validating thoughts that all the stuff suppressed will go away.  We become extremely attached to the opinion of others, so they will reinforce the inauthentic self we put out there.  Everything people do is done in reaction to inflate the ego.  The more approval one gets the more the ego gets justified.  If someone can approve of you they can also disapprove of you.  People can’t have that, so they try harder and harder for approval and they get paranoid that they might lose that approval.  It is a vicious cycle.  This is mostly everyone in this world.  

Are you anxious around people you don’t know?  Its all because you want validation for who you are.  Can’t go talk to someone new because they might not approve of who you are.  The ego is full of anxiety because it needs approval from everyone and everything.   Social media feeds this seeking of approval.  How many likes is your life worth?  Everyone is on their phone seeing how many likes they have or can get.  Taking selfies everywhere to post so they can get approval of their ego life.  Realize you are going to die.  Is the ego life going to be all you are known for?  Contemplating death is one of the best ways to get you to see what really matters.  Caring about what other people think should not be one of them.  

Realize that when others judge you or shame you, its not you they are judging.  They are really judging themselves.  They are dealing with what is inside of them.  People don’t set out to judge others.  They are just trying to disown what’s hidden in themselves.  If you care a lot about what other people think, you are a narcissist.  No one cares about you as much as you think they do.  They all only care about themselves.  Think back to something you thought was crazy or someone you judged because they were acting crazy.  It might of caught your attention for a few minutes, but soon you were right back in your own little world.  This is how all the masses work.  They all want to be in there own little world. Occasionally something happens to get their attention, but soon its back to their own world.    You are not the center of the Universe.  You are the center of your own world.  

Ladies all the time you spend primping and covering up what you think are blemishes is a waste of time.  Its alright for you to want to look pretty, I get it.  Im a guy and I wanted to look good too.  I primped, I admit it. I was just as stuck in the illusion as everyone else.  If you have a pimple or some other blemish, people don’t notice it as much as you do.  If your clothes are not perfect, people don’t notice as much as you think.  They are so busy being worried about their own flaws.  If I meet or talk to a girl I know that has a pimple, I don’t think “OMG she has a pimple”  or next time I see her Im not thinking about the pimple she had.  If someone is thinking like that they are not worth talking to or having as a friend.  What grabs my attention is people out in public being authentic.  They are rare, but most don’t notice them anyway because they are so caught up in their own world.  Think about this, of all the strangers you have mingled with in your life, do you actually think they think about you on a regular basis?  

Think back on your life.  What do you remember the most?  You remember the stories with the most emotion attached to them.  Those emotions could be happiness, sadness, fear, anger and embarrassment.  Those stories are what make your life interesting.  Embrace them.  Make them funny if you have too.  Just embrace all that is your life.  Change your life from trying to be cool to getting cool stories.  Cool stories are interesting.  I try to add contrast to my day everyday.  It makes life interesting.  When things happen to me that I think are bad,  I try to think that when this is finally over its going to make for one interesting funny story.  If you do something embarrassing out in public and everyone starts laughing, getting their phone out and taking pictures, that is going to make one hilarious story.  

Just remember everyone is the star of their own little movie.  Everyone else is background or extras.  Most don’t notice anyone past the length of their arms.  You know when you watch the credits of a movie and it says ‘man in suit’ or ‘woman in red dress’?  That is you in everyone else’s movie.  That is how unimportant you are to everyone else.  They don’t care about you.  This world is me, me, me.  

People can’t approve or disapprove of you if they don’t really know you.  No one can really know you.  Only you can really know yourself and that is the key.  People think they  know themselves and think they don’t like themselves, so they project it on to other people.  Start really getting to know yourself and like what you find.  Become a whole person and you won’t care what others think.  I came to realize that inside everyone is ugly just like me.  Seek approval from only yourself and you will see your true colors and everyone else’s true colors too.