The Prison of Other People’s Opinions

This was short enough that I figured I’d post it here. Words to live by…

“Stress, anxiety and depression are caused when we are living to please others.” – Paulo Coelho

“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.” – Lao Tzu

In our lives, our thoughts and actions come from one of two places; love or fear. One of the most common fears that people have is our fear of what others think of us. Many times, we choose to act or not act based on our opinion of what others will think of us. This is extremely limiting because we are coming from a place of fear and we are choosing to react instead of act. We are reacting to what we believe others will think of us.

What’s so ironic, is that when we act out of fear of what other people think of us, we really don’t know what the other person thinks of us. We are acting out of our perception of what we think they think of us. Most of the time, this is completely false. We have chosen to create a story about what we think others think about us.

I heard someplace the saying that your opinion of me is none of my business. It’s true. What you think of me has nothing to do with me. All of your opinions are based on your experiences, which created filters around all of your interactions with people. For example, if you were abused by three people, and all of these people had tattoos, then you would associate tattoos with abuse, consciously or unconsciously. There is no wide validation of this thought, but for you, it would be your truth. Your opinion of me has nothing to do with me and everything to do with yourself.

If we can choose to love ourselves and act out of love for others, it will expand our possibilities, because we will cease to worry about the opinions of others. Eliminating this one limiting belief can change your life forever.

Bold parts I put in bold because they really resonated with me.