The title of this article can be a bit misconstrued so let’s clarify some issues here.

On the one hand, caring too much about what other people think about you can be very restricting on your life. It can influence your life to the point where your life literally no longer becomes yours. You can’t claim it because the life you live is just based on how you think others around you will view you, so you take your actions accordingly in that perspective, never looking within, only without. You always hesitate to voice your own opinion, you always go with the flow when you really want to do something else, you always sacrifice your individuality for conformity because in the end, you care more about what other people think about you than you do yourself.

Then you have the other end of the spectrum.

If you stop caring altogether about what other people think about you, then you run the risk of potentially alienating yourself entirely from them. You’re only looking out for yourself. You don’t bother to think how your actions can affect other people. And if you don’t bother to care about what other people think about you, you can do just that - your actions can adversely affect others in a negative way until you find yourself all alone (imagine if you always spoke what was on your mind without caring about what other people would think of you if you did).

This article is going to cover how to get to that coveted middle ground, where you can get that healthy amount of freedom where you don’t let what other people think about you essentially dictate you, yet at the same time, still care about what other people think about you so you don’t inadvertently affect them in a negative way.

A LOT of people’s lives are very much influenced simply by what they think other people will think of them, by the actions they take in their lives.

Their choice of work, their choice of spending habits, and sometimes even their choice of marriage partners. It’s a HUGE influence that can become a liability, and more often than not, it becomes just that.

The problem here is that many people have not thought of what THEY wanted.

And even if they do, the biggest problem is that they fail to justify to themselves as to why they should do it. That’s the big key that always seems to be missing.

Their justification is more often than not, based on the fact of how other people will view them and that’s a very shaky foundation to base your justification on because that foundation lies entirely outside of you.

Some may be able to justify what they do by their own reasoning, but that reasoning is often very weak. It’s weak enough that it crumbles under the pressure of caring about what other people think about them.

The best thing you can do to stop caring about what other people think about you is to justify your decisions, your actions, your path in life internally.

YOU have to justify it and when you do, you have to REALLY justify it.

You have to really justify it because it’s our natural tendency to take into account what other people will think about us when deciding what to do when it comes to anything in our lives. We are social creatures and we feel the need to go along with society, but more often than not, the things we want to do go against the grain of the vast majority and if you pursue that, you run some risk of alienation by doing so. It’s the classic case of the individual vs. society.

If you take a step back and look at this issue, you’ll find that everyone goes through 3 phases when it comes to caring about what other people think about them.

Phase 1: You care too much about what other people think about you. The woes of self consciousness, the need to fit in, the wanting to “be cool” in front of total strangers, it all manifests itself in this phase. This usually takes place during the years spent in school, probably up until the end of high school.

Why does this usually happen when you’re young? It’s because your identity, your self image hasn’t really solidified and gotten into clear focus yet, so you just pull a replacement image that has been “approved” by the popular crowd and try to live up to that instead.

Phase 2: Then you get to the “rebel without a cause” phase. You say you don’t care about what other people think about you, but you secretly still do. This usually occurs during the late teenage years and onto early adulthood.

Phase 3: When you get to phase 3, this is when you’re genuinely at peace with yourself and it becomes almost irrelevant as to what other people think about you in terms of your own decision making when it comes to your life in general. I say almost irrelevant because it’s still a factor, but the big difference here is that you’ll have put it in it’s proper place.

What is that proper place?

You still factor that element of caring about what other people think about you in, but ultimately the decision you make after that’s taken into account is yours and justified by you and you alone. You’re not completely enslaved by what you think other people think about you and you don’t completely reject it either.

Determine your own course, set your own way and JUSTIFY it.

And don’t just justify it weakly.

Justify it as much as possible. List as many reasons as you can.

Because the stronger you justify your path in life, the stronger your internal voice becomes and the weaker the outside voices become as well.

You are the captain of your own ship. Don’t just pick a location to head toward to, with the only reason being that other people will think of you in a higher manner if you do so. If you constantly care about what other people think about you, then you’ll constantly change direction based on whatever the current external thoughts of the majority are. Your destinations will constantly change and you’ll just be spinning your engines going nowhere and soon you won’t have enough gas left for you, for where you want to go.

Justifying your decisions, your actions, your choices in life is SO important.

I can’t emphasize this enough.

I think it would be wise to sit down today and to be completely honest with yourself as to the path you’re going down in life right now. Justify it to yourself. Why are you doing it?

You may find you’re doing it for the WRONG reasons. In that case, great. Find a new course with the RIGHT reasons that you and you alone can justify and then it won’t really matter what other people think about you.

On the other hand, you may find you’re doing it for the right reasons, and found that in the process of doing so, found even more reasons that contributed to solidifying your resolve to go down that path even more.

It might seem that the tone of this article is maybe suggesting that if you’re doing what the crowd seems to be doing, then it’s wrong. That’s not so. If you decide to do something and it’s your decision and it’s justified by you, but it also happens to be what the crowd is doing, then so be it. The important thing is that YOU justified your choices internally. It’s just a coincidence it matches what’s going on predominantly on the outside.

You have to be solid internally or else you’ll be pushed every which way by those around you like a rag doll.

Once you decide your own path and justify it, and not just justify it weakly, but REALLY justify it, you’ll be well on your way. And what you’ll find is that you’ll naturally put the issue of caring about what other people think about you in it’s proper place.