This article was originally published on Harvard Business Review.
If you want to be your best and perform at a high level, fear of people’s opinions may be holding you back.
Think about a time when you were extremely anxious — say, before standing up to publicly speak, raising your hand in a big meeting, or even walking through a room of strangers. The reason you felt small and scared and tense is you were worried about social disapproval.
Our fear of other people’s opinions, or FOPO as I call it, has become an irrational and unproductive obsession in the modern world, and its negative effects reach far beyond performance.
If you start paying less and less attention to what makes you you — your talents, beliefs, and values — and start conforming to what others may or may not think, you’ll harm your potential. You’ll start playing it safe because you’re afraid of what will happen on the other side of the critique. You’ll fear being ridiculed or rejected. When challenged, you’ll surrender your viewpoint. You won’t raise your hand when you can’t control the outcome. You won’t go for that promotion because you won’t think you’re qualified.
Read the full article here: https://hbr.org/2019/05/how-to-stop-worrying-about-what-other-people-think-of-you
Check out our live class schedule for classes to help you learn how to stop worrying about others, like Inner Peace and Managing Relationships: https://www.meditation.live/classes