3 Reasons Why What You Think About Yourself Is Who You Become
Opinions are cheap because everyone has one — but your opinion about yourself — that’s invaluable.
World’s most resilient disease: what people will think of me?
Most people are sick. They’re sick because they have strong opinions about other people and more often than not, they’re just projecting their own selves in others.
Research says that our impressionable brain is formed and developed when we’re at the age of 0–7 years. Especially, our subconscious.
Ever heard of the term collective consciousness, and its effect on our perception of the world?
Consider a person born into an upper-middle-class family — well educated, gets a corporate job, and earns a 7-figure income. The values given to him were to live a dignified life, earn a living, take care of his family, make his family, and travel the world.
One night, when he was 6 years old, he was watching a movie — he sees a gun for the first time. So, he asks his father about it. His father explains that guns are owned by criminals and it’s a weapon that’s used to hurt people and we don’t hurt people.
Flash forward, our man is 26 now and works in a corporate job — is returning back from work, and he walks to a parking lot to get his car and drive back home.
Suddenly, a masked man attacks him. He’s got a gun in his hand and asks our corporate guy to give him all the money he has. Our man sees a gun for the first time in real life. Super scared, our guy gives him the money. The masked man still hits him on the back of his head and he falls down and goes unconscious.
Now, consider the masked man’s life. He was born into a lower economic class family — his father pickpocketed and was a thief and his mother used to sell marijuana.
The values he learned from his family was that a gun is not just a weapon, it’s a tool you use in order to earn money and provide for your family. Guns are good for us.
It’s the same thing that they’re talking about but have two extremely different opinions about it. Reason? The world they belong to, and the people they grew up with and spend most of their time with.
1/ The Birth of Self-Image
In India, when we go to school, our self-worth is attached to the marks we’re able to score academically.
The students are even categorized according to their marks.
1. Oh, this one’s a bright kid — first bencher.
2. That one’s an average kid — sits somewhere in the middle rows.
3. Those are back-benchers — they’re a disgrace to the school and their families.
And that’s far from true. All over the world, we have so many examples of dropouts making it big in the world.
But it’s an opinion of a person who’s exposed to the world. And this opinion is important for the kid who’s creating his/ her self-image based on this particular opinion.
I know so many children from that backbenchers’ group (me being one of them) who went on to do so well in their lives.
I know so many children who were always toppers in the class throughout their schooling but are not doing so well in the real world.
One reason is their self-image. An illusion of that image is what was born in the school and so many of them are just trying to live up to that image.
If you believe you can do it, that’s confidence. If you believe only you can do it. That’s arrogance. And that’s one of the reasons for the fall of some of those toppers.
Schools are creating fragile self-image in the minds of children for way too long. By the time children realize it, they are already going through a mid-life crisis.
So many were told that they are the toppers and are going to do so well in their lives, and by scoring marks they believed that they were doing everything right (it’s not their fault — their impressionable minds believed that by doing well academically, they can win at life).
Sadly, that was far from the truth. And the biggest lesson they did not learn is that failure teaches a lot and they never tasted it, at least not in the way life serves it.
So, when they were offered failure for the first time in their work, or in a life which was away from these marks. They didn’t know how to handle it. They began to look at themselves the way backbenchers did when they were younger.
Most of them crumble because they just don’t know how to get past this, they don’t know how to ask for help.
Self-image born out of other people’s opinions about us is a tragedy. But, you can choose to recreate your self-image and a happy beginning.
2/ People’s Opinion is a Reflection Of your Self-image
Adults make opinions very quickly. Apparently, the truth doesn’t matter, in most cases.
Making an opinion about someone and having a judgment gives a quick dopamine shot to the brain. We all love to do it and the worst part — we are not even conscious about it.
What other people think of you is a reflection of who they are, not who you are.
We meet so many different/ new people all the time. And we learn so much about each other but there’s a certain vibe that we give out and that’s because of the self-image that we have about ourselves.
Did you ever imagine that what people think of you could be so much dependent on how you were brought up and the people you spent your time while growing up and still do?
Well, now you can. When we were young and are brought up in an environment where we weren’t allowed to make our choices, our life’s direction is completely based on what other people chose for us — that’s the root cause of why you are indecisive.
I have a friend — he belongs to a business family and I think there’s a certain way children in the business family are brought up. He has a child, merely a 6–year-old son.
One day, he started talking about an incident in his house, where his kid did something and he was extremely happy that his kid made a choice. He was celebrating the fact that his child has started making choices for himself. Something that my family never did.
Sometimes, we make choices for our kids and believe we protect them by making their choices. We are doing exactly the opposite. I think when children begin to make their choices, we need to support and guide them — never make their choices for them.
I think it’s important that they make their own unique mistakes and learn to pay for them. And this is what leads them to make better choices in the future.
The best way you can nurture and allow children to grow is to celebrate when they make their decisions — good or bad can be taken care of. But indecisiveness has the potential to kill you by keeping you alive.
Otherwise, they will end up becoming the kind of people who have to please other people in order to get what they want in their lives because they can’t make that decision for themselves because they never did that so subconsciously they have no idea that this decision is theirs to make.
3/ You know Yourself the Best
Can you tell me about that one person who has been with you all your life? The one person who has witnessed all your experiences — successes, failures, first love, heartbreaks, adventures, misadventures, everything!
It’s you! You have been with yourself all this while and will continue to be whatever next you’re going to do in your life.
Most people judge us for the life we have lived or the experiences we have been through, but they cannot feel or experience what we felt.
They can’t empathize because there's a difference between judging and understanding someone.
Unless you experience life, your empathy will always have limits.
But you can always have empathy for yourself.
I remember, as a kid, I used to cry when I lost my pencil. Largely, there are two ways people look at this -
- Oh, that’s a little kid, he’s immature — he’s crying over a little pencil. (one version of probable truth)
- I understand you lost your pencil, kiddo. Don’t worry, we’ll get you a new one. (another version of probable truth)
But there’s a truth that I knew that nobody else did. That pencil (set of pencils) was gifted to me by my father — on a rainy stormy night when he came back home at 2 AM and my mother and I were shit scared and worried until I reached home. I had slept off and got up just to see him all drenched, but was extremely happy as gave me the gift.
My deepest feelings about the gift? I never wanted that pencil to end. I didn’t want to sharpen it, I wanted those pencils to last. They were precious to me. And what happened to them? They were lost. It’d have been better if I used them.
Empathy towards others is important but empathy towards our own selves is equally important. In fact, it builds compassion in our being.
When a kid loses a pencil, he/ she’s going through emotions that are no less than when an adult loses a friend.
Different circumstances, different experiences, and different ways that these two interpret the world, but the effect of loss is way more similar than you expect.
The point is — go cry over that lost pencil. You don’t owe an explanation to anyone about why you’re crying.
We crave for other people to understand us and see goodness in us because all we see in ourselves is darkness.
LAST
Self-image is born in schools but you’re capable of recreating and rewriting that story.
It could be a double-edged sword when your self-image is born out of other people’s opinions entirely — both are potentially fragile in nature and one incident can shatter them.
Unless you introspect and create your own verdict about who you are, you’d find yourself at the mercy of what other people think of you.
There’s only one person in this entire world who knows what it’s like to be you — that person is you.
We need to train ourselves to see the goodness we carry apart from the pains, and darkness — in fact, sometimes, it helps to acknowledge the darkness too.
The reason why any feeling emerges is that it seeks acknowledgment. And if you’re ignoring how you feel, you’re making things worse.
That’s it for today.
Ciao!
