If we take the time to watch our thoughts, we may notice that when it comes to what we worry about, it is usually other people.

When I first started watching my thoughts, I noticed that when I had nothing to worry about I would create something to worry about! As soon as I caught myself doing this, I would then make myself imagine something positive happening instead. What I found peculiar about this is that I could be succeeding in all areas of life and still be anticipating a huge disappointment.

When I peeled back the layers of this particular onion, I also noticed that my worries were based on what other people might do. This is simple when we think about something like our job. Let’s say we are sailing along and everything is finally running smooth at work, so we start to worry about that picky boss coming in and pointing out something we missed or bringing up something we don’t want to discuss. Maybe we start having that imaginary conversation in our head. We are already defensive.

Sometimes we do this in a new relationship or even an old one. When things are going good, we are waiting for something to go wrong. If we are really wanting it to go a certain way, sometimes we watch to see if our partner reacts how we want them to, or if they remember a detail or an important event. Sometimes at our Holiday dinners, we pay attention to and remember the sarcasm or small nuances of annoyance in conversations.

We can pick out certain details of conversations to then worry about. It seems to be a human habit. The question then becomes – why do we do this?

Certainly, if you’re a person who somehow escapes this thought loop or pattern of worry that so many of us experience, you probably don’t need to read any further. If you don’t experience this kind of worry, I would encourage you to create content that can help guide others toward clearing their heads of the needless worry about what others think of them.

For me personally, I found that I really didn’t much care what people thought about me, but I did worry that I would mess up things in my life because I couldn’t control what they thought of me. I know I am a good person with good intentions, but I don’t always communicate in a way that shows I am willing to receive feedback about myself, and/or cut other people slack for their shortcomings. I’m straightforward and unemotional with business, which could lead one to believe I am critical and have poor leadership skills.

Beyond that, what about when people don’t like someone because they’re competent? I recently had a conversation with a service guy who was filling my propane tank for my wellness center. We started talking about the flowers that were by the tanks and he went into a bit about how this woman, “who, you could tell she was educated” didn’t know that she needed to cut back the Black-eyed Susans for them to grow back each spring. Huh?

This is where we are at in our culture, so don’t take it personally.

I always think about not taking things personally right about the time I am struggling with a situation where I am about to do just that. How do I know this is happening? Because as soon as I feel myself shrinking, and wanting to crawl into my quiet bubble where I can help reduce the ache in my heart and the fire in my belly – I know I am getting my feelings hurt.

This is the first step to overcoming the tendency to take things personally. Notice we are doing it as soon as it starts, or as soon as we notice we are doing it, we stop and redirect our thoughts.

The second step is realizing that culture plays into our interactions and communications more than anything else in life. Culture starts at home, when we are born. We have culture within our family, then culture of the extended family and friends, then culture of the city, county and state we grew up in. Here in America, we follow a broader sense of American culture, especially with the prevalence of using live streaming and social media to share content and ideas in an instant.

I was born and raised in Ohio and moved to the southwest to Arizona at the age of 25. After a few years of being perceived as brash and aggressive, I figured out that the culture in the places I’d lived in within the state of Ohio and the culture in Tucson, Arizona were extremely different. I can tell you the ghettos are much harsher in Cleveland, Youngstown and Toledo Ohio than they are in Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona.

I started explaining to my coworkers that if I am assertive and straightforward and I don’t always say thank you, it’s cultural. I appreciate hard work, and there’s a process and procedure at work plus a sense of urgency that has me being very serious about the job, it’s business and it’s not personal. I also treated my team really well to offset the fact that we were all working our butts off and the job was pretty thankless.

Yet, when I reflect back on those times, we still bumped into one another’s egos and emotions and there were moments that people took things personally no matter what was said and no matter how it was said. I was also in performing bands for ten years, so navigating around egos became a familiar task whether at work or at play. The culture of healthcare and the culture of musicianship have that in common, no matter how well you try to operate, egos will clash and energy will be spent trying to find common ground.

You will never be able to really control the response of others or what they think of you. You absolutely can control not taking things personally. I think the first part of understanding this is recognizing you’re not obligated to take it personally nor are you obligated to care about what others think of you.

You don’t actually have to care what other people think of you in order to reach your goals.

And you might be thinking, “I need to care what my boss thinks of me, I need to care what my peers think of me if I want to succeed.”

I know that you can have success on all levels and be liked even better when you don’t care what they think of you. This works when you make sure above all else, that you respect yourself. If you don’t have high enough standards for yourself, you may not succeed. And if your standards for yourself are too high, you may not succeed.

Our success depends on how we measure up to ourselves. My success is defined differently than most people in my given profession of pharmacy. I felt that my success was pulling away from the corporatized, for-profit businesses and in working locally, even though it definitely means less money. Most people in healthcare are looking for more money and better benefits, not less money, and as a business owner, no benefits.

We all have different dreams, and attaining those depends on us and not others.

One of the best things that a therapist told me almost a year ago that was a valuable piece of information for me as a business owner was:

Not everyone is going to stay. Not everyone is going to like you. Not everyone is going to be the right vibration for you and sometimes people are going to leave in a way that is dramatic and angry, and they may talk all over town about you. Be yourself and own it. Own your own vibration and stick to your vision. Keep being yourself to attract the vibration that is right for you. Don’t try to keep people who are wrong for you just because you’re afraid of what they will say about you. There’s enough people who will join you and support you who are there because of your vision and your vibration – grow that.

I took that message forward with me into 2024 and I had to sit in the middle of little whirlwinds of situations at first like I was trying to stand on one foot in balancing tree-pose during a wind storm. It was surprising to me that the more I decided to create the life of my dreams and went with it, the quicker things changed to get me there. The process of getting there looked nothing like I thought it would! By midway through 2024 my life had changed a lot, and it was continuing to change.

The more I stayed with myself, my essence and my vision, the greater the changes. Some people in my life left that I never thought would leave, and some of the circumstances were unkind. These were unexpected and unwanted changes. I wanted the razzle dazzle of fun and fantasy land friendships and pipe dreams, whereby I got reminded that magical thinking was a thing of my past if I seriously wanted to have the life of my dreams.

The people that really came in and supported me were very real and very humble. I started to form very real support systems that I have never had before. I feel that the biggest factor to getting this key ingredient for success – a support system – was dumping the need for approval. I got rid of the need to try to please everyone and be everybody else’s support. I stopped trying to get support from friends, potential friends or family. I simply stopped trying and started visualizing what I wanted in my life.

Caring too much and trying too hard is exhausting. I learned to let go and let life. It helped me.

It’s easier if we let life unfold without letting others interrupt and influence our experience of it.

We can take comfort in the fact that life will unfold easily when we don’t try to resist the process playing out in front of us. In other words, give up the need to control what is happening.

Statistically speaking, people are more afraid to speak in front of a crowd of other people than they are of death. If we remove the fear of death as an option, many also have a fear of being locked up and losing freedom. Again, this is a fear of other people. Fear is the very thing that actually makes us afraid to live while we are alive.

Rejection and criticism from others can actually stop us in our tracks if we let it. It can be the difference between deciding to be an athlete in middle school, or deciding not to go for it because peers are already being critical at school. Rejection from a teacher can lead to a student shutting down, and the talents may not ever emerge for lack of inspiration and encouragement.

Fear of rejection unfortunately guides so much of what people do in a culture that is competitive. Within ourselves, especially for content producers, coaches, guides, athletes of any kind and anyone who “performs” in front of others – we have to forge ahead with what we truly want to do, with the focus being on the impact we can have, while recognizing the process of our creativity unfolding in front of us. We have to keep our eye on what opportunities may appear. It is easy to miss opportunities when we are distracted by what people think of us.

I’ve performed in front of audiences hundreds of times in my life and I can tell you that I am a fortunate type because I don’t get stage fright, and I’m ok with making a reasonable amount of mistakes in a performance if I know that I did my best. If I make many mistakes, I am hard on myself for not performing better, yes. Yet, had I spent all the time in between performances worrying about what people in the audience thought of me – I would have never made it onto a stage to begin with.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t struggle not to take things personally throughout my interactions in life, even now. I think one of the most difficult things to practice as a discipline is to focus on what we really want to achieve for ourselves and stop focusing on others, and what we think they should be doing. This is particularly hard for parents. It’s also particularly important for parents, because they are setting the prime example for our youth.

It is hard for people to envision being on the other end of their own communication. Added to that is the unfortunate truth about being human – we don’t have the best communication skills. We are not able to read each other’s minds. We are going to make mistakes with how we say things. We might mis-word something over text message and it ends up causing a serious misunderstanding. We have to let go of the need to make things personal and the need to take things personally.

This is why, for people in my generation, the birth of social media meant the end of many friendships. We simply didn’t really know as much about what others were truly thinking. Once people could post it without the look on our face and our reaction being in the room for them to witness – so many revealed hidden sides of themselves. It became just as easy to make things personal and target people and groups online, as it did for us to take posts personally that we could just shrug off.

It’s our choice to rise above the drama and live at a higher vibration and operate at a frequency that doesn’t have to be dragged down by heavy thoughts.

I’d love to encourage content makers to avoid reading the comments and the hate emails from critics. Trust me, I understand how wonderful it is to read comments that pour out love, and at the same time, I feel that depending on that will lead right back to taking everything personally. In other words, to be truly neutral, we can develop the habit of not taking the praise personally either.

It’s like being the Beatles or even Taylor Swift in the now – they sell out shows, they sell merchandise, they sell albums whether they see, hear or believe the fans and critics or not. Their success is largely based on what people think of them, yes, but it wasn’t built on worrying about that and taking every criticism personally. Their success was built on the focus they had on their creativity and building the life of their wildest dreams.

Worry, fear and grudges make us heavy.

No matter what is going on “out there” in the world, our reality and our experience of life is uniquely crafted and created from within ourselves. We start with our home and we create the surroundings that make us comfortable. Some of us create entire families in that home. We can control our role within the home and we can try to set the best example possible for others in the home.

If we chose to worry, be afraid or be angry that someone was insensitive to us – it doesn’t change the fact that we still have to keep creating our life. The more we carry worry, fear and grudges around with us, the lower our vibration gets, we can feel tired and heavy and depressed. Some of us comfort eat, so we literally do get heavy when we are worried or stressed. Some people smoke to quell these emotions. We have to keep going, so we find ways to “cope” with the discomfort.

Imagine moving forward in a way that is lighthearted the day after we got criticized at work or at home. Imagine being able to detach and let go within 24 hours of a perceived insult or slight from a loved one or friend. It’s possible to move on without going back to it in our minds again and again, and without letting it make us want to give up. But how?

After noticing we are doing it, we stop doing it. We replace the worry with a vision of where we want to be and what that looks and feels like. We hold that feeling until we find ourselves back to worrying again. We repeat. Once we notice we are doing it, we stop. We redirect our mind back to seeing ourself as succeeding and having the life of our dreams.

We remind ourselves – right at this moment there are no actual problems happening. If you’re on a device reading a blog, if you’re taking a shower, if you’re cleaning your home – there are no problems. Time is valuable. What you do with your mind and your imagination is valuable while you’re cleaning or showering. Negative thoughts toward self or others will cause uneasiness in the whole body and in the energy level of the body.

Cleaning up our thoughts and lightening our emotional load starts with clearing our unnecessary worry, fear and grudges. We can let these dissolve easily because it will help us to move on and it sets a good example for the people around us. It takes a bit of confidence yes, and that develops as we detach from worry. Confidence develops as we admit that we all make mistakes. Wisdom develops as we understand the people rejecting us are also only human and they are not perfect.

Another truly valuable and challenging skill to develop is humility and realizing when we are simply thinking from our ego. We have to understand that we have also been wrong, and said things wrong, and blamed others when we should have owned our mistakes, and when we should’ve been thinking about how we were affecting others. Think about how many times someone else took what we said personally. We can’t control their reactions, but we can control ours.

In many ways it comes down to forgiving others and having compassion for people when they miscommunicate, or when they deliver criticism. We should be open to constructive criticism from people we chose to have in our lives like our coworkers or our spouse or our teammates. We should make it a practice not to take anything personally – least of all communication that can help us better understand one another.

We have to keep in mind, we are only human and we are dealing with other people who are only human. No matter what role a person plays in society, they are part of the same human collective as you, and you can bet they have the same range of emotions. There are a lot of egos at play and there are more misunderstandings within communication than there are understandings. I encourage all of us to clarify misunderstandings and be accountable.

Building the life of our dreams depends in large part how we relate to others. Relating well helps us network and forge strong bonds and relationships in the areas that matter to us. We have to understand one another to build a home or a team or a town. We need to come together under a common language and agreement on plans in order to get anything to happen. This will be easier without it being bogged down by worry, fear or grudges.

Traveling light and building the life we want on this amazing journey of the human story is easier if we see the road in front of us and create what we want from within our own willpower. Once we get what we want, we must then be aware of the law of diminishing returns. That’s where we switch from the desire to have more, to the appreciation for the abundance we have now.

For now, being in the driver’s seat of our own lives and leading with confidence and creativity will get us further along in our own definition of success if we aren’t being interrupted by worrying about what other people think of us.

Besides, I admire people who dance like no one is watching. I love being around people who aren’t afraid to bloom and express themselves through any form of creativity, and who shine in the face of fans and critics alike. To me, the more blooming the better and there is enough room for every single person to succeed.