_{*Quick Summary: The author speaks on the subject of other people’s opinions of you, and if it should affect you.*}

As a child and even a young man, I would often worry what others thought of me. Obsess would be a better word. I was almost paralyzed with the fear of not being liked, saying or doing the wrong thing, or somehow not meeting other people’s expectations. Any “wrong” step I’d make would be run back and played over and over like a tape in my head, while I beat myself up over how stupid I must have come across. I overthought every interaction, no matter how trivial.

When I hit 40, all that changed due to an encounter with someone I thought a lot of whose opinion of me turned 180°. I had invested a lot of myself in this person and their family, and I knew we were on solid ground. This person was then fed some misinformation about me, and thought I was involved in causing them to lose their job. This ended poorly with harassment of my family by him and his family, and generally a bad situation. It was that incident that made me realize no matter what I did, how innocent I was, or how far I went to help someone, it could all be thrown away in an instant. I couldn’t control what others thought of me, but I could control how I reacted to it. The adage, “What other people think of you is none of your business.” really did apply. 

Around the same time I heard a wise woman say something that has stuck with me since. It really capped off my lesson. “You might wonder what other people think of your missteps. Let me tell you, they don’t. They’re too worried about their own lives to spend an extra second thinking of yours”. I also saw the quote, “We would worry less about what others think of us if we realized how seldom they do”. Those words reassured me simply because I knew I really didn’t think of other people’s mistakes or shortcomings that much either, so I knew it was true. Taking the opposite approach and knowing that someone did think of me in a negative way, proved that no matter whether they thought of you or not, you can’t control it either way.

Since then, I’ve worked to improve myself. I’ve taken all the anxiety and self-abuse I put into worrying if I’d messed up and turned it into action helping others when opportunities present themselves. Not so I hope they’ll think well of me, but simply because it’s the right thing to do. In addition, spending more time thinking of/taking action for others makes you a better person. That change in focus means if things in a relationship go off the rails again in the future, I will have a better grasp of it, knowing I was more motivated by love and doing the right thing than I was by fear of what people would say.

So if you’re like I was and you replay bonehead moves over and over in your head, stop that! You’re likely the only one who noticed. They were too busy thinking about themselves to see.