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When I was making my decision to quit residency and walk away from my career in medicine, a huge fear I struggled with was “what will other people think?”
I felt paralyzed by this fear of judgement.
If I just straight up quit residency and go off on this adventure to travel the world, will people think I’m selfish, ridiculous, frivolous? Will they understand? Will they think I am being “too millennial” or “idealistic?” Will they say that no one is actually happy in a job- just suck it up and do the job?
Will they make fun of me? Will they laugh? Will they think that I probably just couldn’t cut it as a doctor or I wasn’t hardcore enough for residency?
For a long time, I agonized over this question which came down to- what will people think of me following my heart? What will people think of me if I deviate from society’s version of success and create my own definition?
And then, one night as I struggled with this, I had an epiphany. I’m sitting here worrying about what my friends, family and coworkers will think of me, but they aren’t here with me right now.
They aren’t suffering with me in this moment of misery. They aren’t living my life with me. They don’t come along with me for every moment of my day. They don’t have to live every day as me and live with the consequences of my decisions.
They aren’t HERE with me right now. So ultimately what they think about me or my decisions… doesn’t matter.
And that realization was so freeing.
It enabled me to stop caring what other people think of my decisions and to just go after what it is I truly want. And I want to help you create this level of freedom too.
Because we talk so much about wanting freedom, but we can never be truly free when we are bound by the opinions and expectations of others. When we live for other people, we generally feel lost and confused. Because inevitably a tension will surface between what we really want and what we think we SHOULD do to make other people happy.
So let’s talk about why other people’s opinions just don’t freaking matter. My hope is that you can start to internalize these reasons and begin to let the fear of other people’s judgement melt away.
You will never ACTUALLY know
Do we every REALLY know what other people are thinking of us? Or are we constantly jumping to conclusions about what they must be thinking and feeling based on their facial expressions or behavior? Based on things they say or don’t say?
A neighbor driving by doesn’t return our friendly wave, so we assume they must be snubbing us- when in reality they were just lost in a daydream and didn’t see us.
None of us can read minds. So we will never ACTUALLY know what anyone is thinking.
We only know what people tell us through their words and body language, but often there is plenty going on in people’s minds that they do not share.
We can spend all of our time guessing and speculating what other people might think of us and our decisions, but doesn’t that sound like such a terrific waste of time and energy?
Does it really make sense to live your life and make your decisions based on your guestimations of what other people might think of you? Doesn’t that sound like a rather insane way to live?
Nobody is YOU so how can they know what is best for you?
I was listening to the Mind Your Business Podcast (one of my new obsessions) and James Wedmore gave this beautiful analogy.
When you go out to lunch with a friend, do you routinely let them order for you? You sit down at the table, the waiter comes by and asks what you want and you look up at your friend, waiting for them to guess your order and seal your fate.
No, that doesn’t happen. You look at the menu. You pick out what YOU are craving to eat and you order that thing. How could your friend know what it is that your body is craving on that particular day? They are not you. They don’t live in your body. They don’t feel what you feel. They don’t know what you know.
So they don’t order for you.
We accept that when it comes to food related decisions and we make our own lunch choices. So why is it so difficult to accept for other areas of our lives?
Other people don’t actually know what is best for us on a soul level, so allowing them to dictate our lives and our decisions is an exercise in futility. It is essentially asking for dissatisfaction.
We know ourselves best. We think our thoughts. We feel our feelings. We live the daily moments of our lives and have to contend with the consequences of our decisions. So shouldn’t we be responsible for making our own decisions?
People will judge you anyways
This might be a hard truth to accept for some of us, I know it was for me.
The thing is…. people are going to judge us regardless of what we do. We can’t avoid being judged by other people. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke to this truth when she said, “Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you’ll be criticized anyway.”
People are going to criticize us anyways so isn’t it better to be criticized for doing something we genuinely love and believe in?
When I was working in medicine, training to be an OBGYN, I learned this lesson the hard way. As a resident, I was never the one ultimately in charge, so I always had to run my medical decisions and treatment plans by my attendings.
Many times I played the game of trying to please the attending on call. I came up with a treatment plan that I thought the attending would agree with, instead of following what I wanted to do based on my medical experience. If an attending was risk averse, I would propose to admit the multiparous patient in labor whose cervix was 4 cm dilated. If the attending on call was less conservative, I would propose to send the patient home with labor precautions.
It was this weird dance, where instead of trying to hone my medical decision making skills, I was just trying to figure out how to please the attending on call. And ultimately it was a lose lose game. Either I would guess right and I wouldn’t learn anything or I would guess wrong. When I guessed incorrectly, it was the worst because I felt like such a fraud and a failure for suggesting something I didn’t even agree with in the first place.
The point of all of this is, people are going to judge you no matter what you do. You really can’t escape or avoid judgement from others, so what is the point in dancing around like a nutcase trying to avoid that judgement. Especially when all that dancing around and avoiding judgement causes you to violate your own values, beliefs and desires.
People aren’t actually thinking about YOU, they are thinking about THEMSELVES.
Other people are thinking about you and your life through the lens of THEIR life. When someone else is thinking about and judging your life- they are doing so in relation to how your decisions affect their life.
Even if they are a super selfless person and have the purest of intentions. Even if this is unintentional and they don’t mean to, they are still thinking about YOUR life and your decisions as it relates to and affects them.
Whether its about making themselves look good or keeping their life status quo and comfortable, there is no way for someone involved in your life to be completely neutral or objective about your life and your decisions.
We are going to survive if some people judge us
I think we have been heavily programmed to fear the judgement of others due to our evolutionary past. Back in the caveman days, if others judged us hard enough and subsequently shunned us from the tribe- we were screwed. Without the protection and teamwork of our compadres, we would quickly die from a predator attack or starvation.
However, this is no longer the case anymore in the society we live in. Sure, we still need love and connection, but there is no longer just ONE place to get that from. If we are rejected by one group, all hope is not lost. We can always find another group of like minded individuals who accept and love us.
Being judged by other people is no longer a threat to our very survival, so we don’t have to be mortally afraid of the negative opinions of others. Ask yourself- even if these people DO judge me, what is the worst that can happen?
So who are you really living for? Because if you are living your life to please others or avoid judgment, then you are playing a losing game.
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