Eliminating self-doubt

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

To what degree to you care what other people think?

I used to care a lot what other people thought. More to the point, I used to care what other people thought OF ME. I think I get that from my mom. Because as I talk to her today, I realize that she cares a lot more about what people think that I do.

I don’t mean to blame all of my issues on my mom, but that’s really what I was was brought up around on a day-to-day basis.

I remember this extreme level of self-conscious and low self-esteem taking place during my middle school in high school years. For most of that time, when I walked from one class to the next, I would walk with my head down. I was afraid to even make eye contact with people. And when I walked by people, if I heard them laugh, I assumed they were laughing at me.

I know now on one level that is an extreme level of insecurity; but at the same time, it’s also kind of arrogant for me to assume that everybody was talking about me or looking at me or thinking about me.

I think I really stopped caring what other people thought, or at least I got some of my self-esteem together, after my high school trip to France. Something about that trip really made me come out of my shell with some of my classmates. In fact, when I think back to my high school experience, I divide up in the two phases: before going to France and after going to France

But I really think that my last vestige is of even carrying what other people thought went out the window with my marriage. I mean, I’m divorced. I had a failed marriage, you can’t hide that. There is no running away from that. And quite frankly, there’s nothing to really be ashamed of their either. At that point, I joined the other 51% of married people.

The other thing is that even though in my head, I’m still perpetually 17 years old, I’m 51 years old. My students look at me like I’m old, because I kind of am. And I’m sure that a lot of people out in public in general look at me as an older guy, again because I am. Maybe it’s something that just comes with experience, or even wisdom: not worrying so much about what other people think.

I learned a while ago that the only things you can control in this world is how you treat other people and how you react to the way that other people treat you. Anything else is really out of your individual control.

The two extremes of self-conscience

There are, in my opinion, two extremes of self-conscience, or caring what people really think of you. On one end of the spectrum, you have people with low self-esteem. They don’t think very highly of themselves so they are concerned about what other people think of them. Sadly, they let too much of their own self-worth be determined by what other people think.

On the opposite end, you have the narcissist. They are so concerned about how people perceive them to be, that they will do whatever they can to spend a positive narrative about themselves. , Unfortunately, I have far too much firsthand experience with this.

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