Welcome to Mindset, Mood and Movement. A systemic approach to human behaviour, performance and wellbeing. How psychological, emotional and physical health are all connected. In this episode I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience to help you overcome a challenge that you might be facing in life, health or work. hello and welcome. Are you worried what other people think of you? Why do we give so much energy to the opinion of others? Now this is an innately human pattern and it comes up for, for many of us in many different guises. And in this episode, I'm going to talk about it when it's kind of maladaptive, a problem and stopping you. It's something I come across numerous times in my coaching practice and it's normally one of the. belief patterns, behavioral patterns that causes a huge block in people's lives. But it's important. Now, if this goes back a long way, some of you may know Marcus Aurelius, the, uh, the famous Roman emperor and philosopher who wrote, uh, meditations. So this is going back a couple of thousand years. And he said, we all love ourselves more than other people, but care about their opinions more than our own, whether they're friends, strangers or enemies. So this is a innately human patterns been going on a long time. Which makes us hopefully think a bit deeper like, well, it serves something much more deep, powerful and necessary. So I'm going to share a story about a client I've worked with. Obviously it's, um, I'm going to alias the client, so for confidentiality. But I want to explain this because if you are struggling and if you overly think and worry what other people think of you, this could hold you back. Now I work with, we'll call him Joe. Joe was a super high level professional, uh, highly intelligent, had a family, uh, been working in, uh, the, the sector of finance for a long time and was doing really well. So, so one would say from the outside, you know, money is coming in success in the corporate space, but she was disillusioned. She was going to work and just finding an emptiness and joking to my practice to, to talk through about change, about how to move from this, you know, unhappy life. So really that's what it was. Yes, she had the money. Yes, she had the what seemed like external validation and success, but she wasn't happy. She wasn't fulfilled. And that's no way to live. So we thankfully she came to me and we were working through this. So the first thing that I got really interested in was, you know, ask the question, what's at stake? Why does this opinion of others matter? Why can't you leave this job that you're kind of, you're feeling like you can't for some reason. She wanted to go into creating her own business with a very creative edge and why was this not happening? So we did a lot of work and so much was coming out and this is, this is a general theme now. This is so much about grouping. Connection, sharing. We human beings are groupers. Yeah, we're like selves that come together. Everyone, even those of us who like to be different. We like to be with our mates who are also different. You know, whether you're a skateboarder, a tech person, entrepreneur, skier, doesn't matter. You'll always find someone like you, even if you're the different group. We look at cities, you know, people come together as cities and groups of people. We are magnetized by the people and it matters. And this goes back a long way, and this is what I brought to the, to the work we did with Joe. If we go back to his early roots, humans are incredibly good at functioning together with social species. We're not that powerful as an animal compared to, say, lions and bears and, you know, those big powerful animals, but we're very clever. We've always had high level understanding of how to work as, as, as a team, as a pack. And, and over those early formations of our ancestors, we understood that working together was paramount. And of course, the opposite goes true. If we are alone, if we are out of the group, that is potentially a fatal situation. Now, over the years, we've come to know this experience and this feeling, this emotional feeling in us, and it's called shame. It's when we are cast out. Or in our culture, we often call it an outcast. We're out of the group. Now this would have made a lot of sense going back a long way and let's say the hunter gatherer, times and how that might've been in today's world with tech, properties, cars, the culture we live in, it's not quite as. is damaging to not be part of the group. And yet those early formations still apply. We are still wanting to be part of a group. And to be out of our group is, tantamount to death. So its roots are deep. They're deep wired in our neurology, they're deep wired in our ancestry. So when we come to the present day question like, Oh, why do I care so much what my other half thinks? Or what my mum and dad think? Or what someone on LinkedIn or Instagram thinks? It's not so much the surface impact. It's the deep impact. It's this deeply innate trigger. I suppose we could say that this could be very, very dangerous for us. Now the issue here is. It's maladaptive. That's a great response back in the day, if you're, I don't know, in the drive having to survive. In today's world, you can get your food delivered to the house. You don't need to worry about that sort of thing. Most of us, hopefully, live in a fairly safe and structured property and, we don't have to worry about, animals around us hurting us. But the response remains and now it's become very abstract. So when we think of Joe who was struggling to find the depth and happiness in life and move on from her career and create something powerful and wonderful and be fulfilled in a, in the entrepreneur world. The belief block was there. It was holding her back. So we did a lot of work around the explanation as I'm doing now, but the feeling, what does it feel like when you are, pushing on the edge when you believe that people won't accept you? Uh, and there's a term for this, which is pariah. Tough word, but that's, that's a term that's often used in English. You're a pariah. You are out there. You're not part of the group. And what I find fascinating is this maladaptive process and worrying what other people think of us can actually transition from pariah to outlier. Now an outlier is an interesting one. It's a more common term. You may be aware of it. Outlier links us to pioneer. leader, forward thinker, courageous person. And it's interesting, isn't it? That we got to have this internal emotional psychological shift from the fear and belief of being a pariah to shift into an outlier. And I would say an outlier in the space I work with helping people make their own decisions. It's the place to be. So the question is, how do we tap into that authentic voice that's within that authentic voice that's within you that says, I want to do this, but I'm worried about other people's think. And it comes from a very important state of making peace. with several things. Making peace with the fact that you can't make everyone happy. And that's a fool's errand. Sometimes we'll do things, even if we don't mean to, which might upset someone, even if we don't mean to. So we get very caught up in this attachment to others, and there lies an opportunity to shift. So when we start to check in with some important learnings here, and I'm going to share four that I see was really helpful, and I shared this with Joe. So the insight number one, and I learned this years ago, I had a coach that said to me about this and they said how often do you spend thinking about other people? And I'm used on the question for a while and I thought, not that long. I spend more time thinking about myself, my own internal experience. And she was like, yeah, exactly right. We all spend most of our thinking and feeling time connected with us, the I. We're not bothered about other people that much. We just don't care. We care about ourselves. So here's the freedom in that. If people don't really care that much about what we're doing, they're not that bothered, then we can be liberated from the fear of that. So that's the first understanding. Second, understand that these are instinctual responses, and an instinctual response to avoid shame of being cast out is utterly natural. but quite likely completely out of whack with where you're at today, the circumstance you find yourself in. So for Joe, it was saying to a partner, look, I'm so disillusioned. I've got to do something well in my life. This is going to damage everything if I keep pretending to be okay with this job. And by talking it through and saying, look, you know, I have to do this. I know you may not, you're nervous, you're worried, but I have to do this. But then suddenly that, that. Elegance of communication and authenticity meant that the people that were doubting and were uncomfortable still, still kind of said, well, okay, look, okay, we get it. I'll support you. So expressing, understanding and knowing that instinctual response, but expressing in the real world is the second big thing to shift. Thirdly, and this really worked with, with Joe, is avoid being part of the problem. Stop judging yourself. Stop judging others as much as you can. Avoid the process of judgment. And the reason for this, it's a perceptual thing. It's a psychological perceptual shift. What we pay attention to is what we see. So if we are conscious or unconscious and judging how we are and judging what's going on, judgment is what we see. The more we can attend to the internal perception about, let's just let the judgments go, just let them pass, let them fade, is that they fade in our perceptual filters of what's going on around us. And that is so powerful. It's not easy. It takes daily practice because the culture of immersing is one of opinions and judgments. For anyone who's self aware, it's Utterly possible. And it's again, one of the freedom pieces here. And finally to go into a really first position, experience your body's response. So if you're having a fear or worry what someone's thinking of you, what does your body do? What are the sensations? First and foremost, fear is natural. And if it's habitual for you, it's going to come up every time you dare speak up or do something different, be the leader you want to be, whatever that is. Notice the fear, sensation, notice where it is in your body, and do nothing apart from observe. For me, it's very much centered in my abdomen, in my, in sort of core center, that's where I feel it. For others I've worked with, I remember Jo, it was very, in her shoulders, and there was a lot of activity and tension there. And simply by allowing it to be, aware of the breath, these Sensory signals that affect the goings back to the brain start to change the internal environment of your body, brain, and then that changes your, your experience. And then we realized that while fear is maybe natural, habitual, it doesn't need to be absolute. And you can be careful with what you're doing. We're not talking about being reckless, but you can move forwards and make choices. And I would say that is great self leadership. So if you want to be in a place of leadership in your work, in your business, that is a very powerful way. So I trust all of that has been useful. The opinion of others, it's always going to be there as a thought. It has its natural and a valid reason to be there. But in today's world, move from pariah to outlier in your mind. Set yourself free from this pattern because... Generally, if you weren't afraid to do stuff, there'd be so many things available and fear is natural, but fear does not want to be absolute and restrictive. So I trust that is a, a little whirlwind journey that might give you some insights, give you some tools to help you become. A little freer when that pattern of worrying what other people think of you sneaks up in your mind, you can check it and go, Ah, I know what this is. I know why this is, and I know some strategies to deal with it. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe. And if a friend would benefit from hearing this, do send it on to them as well. If you would like to get in touch yourself, then you can go to my website. Which is Sal Jeffries dot com, spelt S A L J E F F E R I E S. Sal Jeffries dot com. Hit the get in touch link and there you can send me a direct message. If you'd like to go one step further and learn whether coaching can help you overcome a challenge or a block in your life, then do reach out and I offer a call where we can discuss how this may be able to help you. Until the next time, take care.