I was speaking with a fellow homeschool mom recently, and she was grieving over what other people thought about her homeschooling her children.
Another day, I was in the grocery store when I overheard someone say, "I don't want people to think I don't have anything in my house."
Ma'am... we're at the grocery store.
While I was on a walk, a young woman's car had broken down. Her husband told her, "Don't have people out here thinking I don't take care of my car."
There are countless examples like these, and every time I hear them, I think:
Why do we believe people are so concerned with us?
What has conditioned us to want to police someone else's thoughts about us? Why do we spend so much energy trying to manage perceptions that we can never truly control?
I know this mindset well because I used to live there too.
Today, I want to share how I freed myself from this diabolical, paralyzing way of moving through life.
First Things First...
In my Notorious B.I.G. voice:
1. If someone thinks about you, it's probably by accident.
Unless someone has a close relationship with you, they're probably not spending much time thinking about you at all.
Think about the examples I shared earlier.
How many times have you been minding your business when someone said something that caught your attention?
You weren't looking for that conversation. You weren't planning to hear it. You just happened to walk, drive, sit, or scroll into another person's thoughts as they spilled into your experience.
It wasn't intentional.
It simply happened.
The same thing applies to you.
Most people aren't sitting around creating detailed stories about your life. They have their own lives, responsibilities, worries, and dreams occupying their attention.
Many times, we invite other people into spaces in our minds that only belong to us.
As you'll see in the next point, people usually don't know enough about you to think about you in a way that should cause you to change who you are.
2. When people think about you, it's from a perception you weren't a part of creating.
Ahhh, perception.
The lens through which people view the world.
Perception is built from personal experiences, beliefs, judgments, assumptions, and conclusions. It becomes the framework people use until they encounter something that changes it.
When someone notices you, and you suddenly start wondering what they think about you, remember this:
Their perception has more to do with them than it does with you.
For example, my husband believes that if a homeless person asks for food, we should purchase exactly what they're requesting.
Why?
Because his experiences have shown him people taking money and using it in ways that keep them stuck in harmful situations.
I tend to look at it differently. I'll often give them what they ask for because I know I can't control what happens after that. For all I know, they could sell the item and still buy something harmful. Or maybe they're genuinely in need.
The truth is, neither of us knows their full story.
Who is to say they're homeless? People can be good actors.
The point is this:
Neither of us is in that person's head.
We don't know their history.
We don't know their struggles.
We don't know their decisions, values, motivations, or circumstances.
Without that information, we can't accurately determine who they are.
And the same applies to you.
Those people out there don't know you.
You cannot measure your worth, your heart, or your character based on what you imagine someone else might be thinking.
They weren't in your marriage when you got divorced.
Sometimes the people inside the marriage don't fully understand why it ended.
Yet somehow people who were never there suddenly know the whole story?
Okay.
Get out of their head and back into your life.
3. Become so sure of yourself that what you think others are thinking no longer blocks your growth.
That's a mouthful, I know.
And yes, that's a run-on sentence.
See what I did there?
Okay, let me get out of y'all's heads and get back to the point.
Become so grounded in who you are that imagined opinions stop preventing you from becoming who you're meant to be.
I wish I had learned this years ago.
There were times when I wanted to make decisions based on my growth trajectory, but instead I made decisions based on someone else's trauma projection.
That was a good sentence.
See? I told y'all I could write.
The reality is that many of us never develop a strong enough foundation within ourselves to fully support our own decisions.
So when we think people are watching us, judging us, and forming opinions about our choices, we start adjusting our behavior to fit those imagined expectations.
And what does that do?
It encourages us to conform.
It makes us second-guess ourselves.
It makes it harder to trust our intuition, our gut responses, our faith, the Holy Spirit, or whatever guides us along our path.
Before long, you're no longer following your own path.
You're following theirs.
The problem is their path isn't attached to your purpose.
And when you spend enough time walking someone else's road, you may eventually find yourself in a place you never wanted to be.
You know...
One of those wrong place, wrong time situations.
Final Thoughts
People don't know you as well as you think they do.
Most people are operating from limited information, personal experiences, and assumptions that have very little to do with who you truly are.
So stop exhausting yourself trying to manage thoughts that don't belong to you.
Stop editing yourself for an audience that isn't paying nearly as much attention as you think.
Stop shrinking your life to fit inside someone else's perception.
Your responsibility is not to control what people think.
Your responsibility is to become so clear about who you are that what they think no longer determines what you do.
Because the life you're meant to live can only be lived by you.
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