Imagine you are meeting your significant other’s parents and through no fault of yours, they don’t like you. You try everything to impress but it just makes life worse for you. You become someone less than who you are just to fall all over yourself to make things better. Nothing is working. They don’t like you and it’s bothering you.
You are at work and though your boss likes you and the work is good, there are coworkers who are creating a poisonous work environment because of jealousy or other reasons why they've decided not to like you. You try playing nice, become agreeable, offer to help – but it’s no use, they continue to make it known they aren’t changing.
What about breaking up with someone who takes it very badly, and uses social media to vent out personal hints that you are a horrible person and the reason for their problems. You try to calm the waters, ask them to stop, or even make your own public rebuttals, but the treatment continues. It’s as if they want nothing else but to hate you and let you know it.
When these things happen, one thing I that helps keep me going is what I read years ago: “What someone thinks of you is none of your business.” It’s as if something inside clicked when I really understood what that meant. I began to truly shrug off someone else's bad behaviour since it couldn’t be changed – not from me anyway. These are a few steps that helped me stop fussing over what I couldn’t control.
Auntie Ozanne’s Guide to Stop Worrying About What Others Think
1. If it wasn’t you, it would be someone else. We tend to think that it’s just all about us. “It’s me she doesn’t like, it’s me he can’t get over, it’s me they are being rude to.” NO. It’s more than just you, the one person you are. It was someone else before you, and will be someone else after you. If you stop focusing on the “id” part of something that has really nothing to do with you, you can separate bad feelings of the overall problem someone has had to the small problem someone is having at that particular moment.
2. People notice when you lose power. It’s obvious when you are trying hard to try and right someone’s wrong idea of you, and they love knowing they are controlling you. It’s a power struggle, and someone’s insecurities are in control when they successfully see you act like a lap dog. It doesn’t make their thinking or behaviour stop. In fact, they’ll just relish in it, and make you continue as if you’re a court jester. This is when it’s hard to grasp, but catering and succumbing to someone’s intentions just to please them are no more resolving the issue than doing nothing. COMMUNICATION is the power. Ask, “I notice that you aren’t happy with what I’m doing, what is it exactly we can do to improve this situation?” Make them understand that the “we” part in that question means it’s not all about you being a dog jumping through hoops to change. They are part of it, and if they don’t want to make an effort along with you, then they are satisfied to be selfish and catered to and you are expected to be less than who you are to please them. Time to disconnect from people like this, and go back to being just you, the person you know that is liked and loved by others without having to explain or change yourself.
3. Stop giving the problem attention. Start giving the solution the attention! My mother-in-law was (and still is) horrible to me. I had enough of her bad attitude and behaviour toward me, and once asked her point blank what the issue was, and how talking about it was how I was willing to come to any resolution. She was stunned. It was as if I yanked all her power and excuse away for being a bitch. She had no where to go but to talk, and when she refused, the last thing anyone was aware of is that I made the effort and she made none from a very grown-up request of “just talking” to try and fix it. If she badmouthed me, she could not truly say that the ball was left in her court and she failed. I continued to help her and do the things I knew were right, instead of retaliating and doing harm which is what she wanted. That's no resolution. She wanted a reason to hate me. I refused to give her that satisfaction, as it wasn't in my nature to be a bitch anyway. To try and improve things without losing myself is the way to go, no matter what she thinks.
4. How someone grieves a break-up is personal. You can’t change this, whether it was you doing the heart-breaking or someone else. If someone you broke up with takes it badly and they begin speaking badly about you, or stalking you, or doing something that is meant to make you angry and uncomfortable – it’s key to know that THIS is how they have learned to deal with their feelings. Instead of them moving on, they have chosen to sit in the moment of misery to try and gain some control they obviously felt they lost during the breakup. They need to feel validated, and that is their business, not yours. It’s how they are dealing with it, and it’s not for you to fix or change. Perhaps it's how they picked things up from their parents' bad marriage or their friends' bad relationships that this is how to act, but it's nonetheless how they've chosen to grieve you. It’s why you are not in this relationship anymore because there is no room for their toxicity and hunger for control over you. I was once online stalked by a guy in America who I turned down and for two years after, he made my online life hell by following me everywhere on social sites I used and to contact my friends to tell them lies about me. I was so busy trying to stomp out his fires that it was pointed out to me by the police that this is exactly the attention he was looking for. He wanted to see me scramble. Since he couldn’t have me, he was grasping at ways to get my attention, even if the attention had to be negative. Even if someone out there believed I was a terrible person because of how he thought of me, I had to stop. I cut the cord, and decided that I had to change my thinking. I began to amusingly think that this poor soul has so much trouble getting over me, it’s made him crazy. I decided that this was how he grieved me and how he handled rejection that it was not my problem but his to get over. It was not my responsibility to make him stop. He was going to do what he wanted to do regardless of what I said or did, and that was his business, not mine. The only thing I could do was control what I did, and that was to let him go self-destruct even if a couple of people bought in to his nonsense. Eventually he got bored that my attention was gone and I had last heard he moved on to another girl online to torment.
5. Focus on your job at work, and your friends outside of work. If you have coworkers who are making you miserable and preventing you from doing a good job, you need to make this known to your supervisor without the fear that you are hurting feelings. The people responsible for playing games and making it personal are the ones who will pay for this, not you. If you are doing all you can to just make your day to day life at work bearable but get constant interruptions and have your work sabotaged by someone, then what they are doing is bring their personal bullshit to work and making it a priority over the job at hand, and your supervisor needs to know this. But instead of the tattling approach, use words like, “This situation with (whoever it is) has to improve.” If you are asked to give examples, leave your feelings out of it. Don’t say, “I feel bad when I can’t get this project finished.” Instead say, “His/her behaviour is preventing me from effectively finishing this project.” (If the reason is because you need a five-minute break to go to the washroom and cry, your boss only needs to know that you need to take time to collect yourself before continuing to work, and that is very non-productive and no good for anyone involved.) You aren’t at work to make friends, though we constantly continue to find friendship at work. It’s normal as human beings to find the social in everyday routines. But when you think long term and wonder if this person or people involved in making you miserable are really going to be in your life forever, you can quickly stop investing in how you should change to make them feel better. You might be promoted, or they might quit next month. To worry about how to curb their bad feelings towards you is wasted effort. You can only control what you continue to know how to do which is your job and to do it without hurting others and making sure the end goal is met at work. If things do look long term, talk about options such as changing shifts to work opposite of someone, or even a transfer to a different location if it’s possible. That way you have worked toward a resolution that works for YOU, not to cater to continue what is best for them.
6. What someone thinks of you is none of your business. Finally, it doesn’t matter if it’s some asshat in traffic who flips you off, or a crusty woman in an elevator who mumbles something rude to you. Your relationship with people like this will last all of ten seconds and you will never ever have to see this person again in your life. After that ten seconds, know that they are someone else’s problem somewhere else in the world. Someone has to feed them, talk to them, see them – and you do not. What they think of you or how they react to you has nothing to do with you, and likely they will forget about you as soon as you are gone anyway. When people who are active in our lives make it rough for us, what they think is also none of our business. You and I cannot control what people think. Just as I continue to have the opinion that the jerk in America who online-stalked me is an asshole, not he or his family will change my thought on that, nor can I change whatever his thought is about me. It just doesn’t matter.
How much of this actually consumes your life and if it starts changing you for the worse, or changes you to be someone you’re not (or not comfortable with being), is your choice. If you invest your time in the wrong people, you are actually losing investment in the right people. For example, my mother-in-law’s nasty behaviour is meant to be a wedge between me and my husband. She wants me to become a lesser woman, crying, complaining, and being something I’m not so that my husband can note the change for the worst. Instead, she made me stronger. I told him that, “I am not going to change the wife I am to you so I can be a different daughter-in-law for her.” He is my primary relationship, not whatever one I have with her. This power is not something I am readily going to give her. She will hate me whether I change or not – and that is something I have experienced since I tried different methods to make her happy and nothing changed. Therefore, what she thinks of me is none of my business. And what I think of her is none of hers.
People envy confidence, and when they truly see that their behaviour doesn’t get to us, because hey – they are the ones with the problem, not us – it lessens their ability to control us, making them weak. They need to find new ways to feel better, and since their one way of attacking or sabotaging isn’t working, they will find a new victim until they realize that maybe they can get some resolution sitting in a chair across from a therapist to get to the real heart of the matter of why they hate anything and anyone so much. Let that be their problem to deal with, while you ride out in to the sunset knowing you did your best.
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