The Desert of Arizona
Clear 76 Degrees – 8:17 a.m.
It’s easy to tell people to stop worrying about what others think of them.
Actually doing it is much harder.
In fact, I’m not sure you can think yourself to that goal. You can’t just tell yourself to stop caring about the opinions of other people. That’s just giving more energy to the problem. What you feed grows.
As with most of the obstacles I’ve faced over the years, I’ve not really figured out how to solve any of them directly.
Instead, I’ve figured out ways to reverse engineer solutions.
For example, how you do fix someone who is lazy about marketing himself to attract clients? Not saying I KNOW anyone like that personally. But if I did, and if someone like that happened to be someone you get an email from every day, well, then how could you fix someone like this?
You have him start a daily email newsletter habit and tell the whole world about it! Instant commitment!
Here’s another example. Let’s say you know someone who is a “Yes” man. He just can’t say no to anyone. How would you fix him to keep him from drowning in all the commitments he makes to others? Like with phone calls, for example. How do you keep someone like that from filling his calendar with other people’s issues? (Again, not saying I KNOW anyone like this personally!)
Well, you would hand him a self-service phone scheduling platform that allows him to make only parts of his schedule available to the world. That is his “Instant ‘NO’ Generator” without having to say NO!
Do you see a pattern here?
You don’t have to change yourself through force. You don’t have to feel bad about the way you are. You reverse engineer change strategically.
You do that long enough and that change you were trying to force yourself to make becomes your new normal without you even noticing.
So how do you reverse engineer the end of you caring about the opinions of others?
You do it by filling your field of vision with the people you are trying to help. You don’t will yourself to stop carrying about the haters, you simply crowd them out by focusing solely on the people who WANT you to help them.