What goes around comes around. When you’re prejudiced towards others, you’re opening your mind to possibilities that others are judging your every action.
I’m not saying nobody will ever judge you because there are probably internet trolls who have something against your ever action. You can’t control that.
You can, however, control your actions and how it affects you
I went to the National Achiever’s Congress in Singapore last year. There was a young entrepreneur and during a public interview session, I said:
When I saw you were on the speakers’ line up, I thought you were too young to be speaking at such an event. How do you make people take you seriously as a youth entrepreneur? Because when I started out, I feel people were doubting me.
His answer was to just do it.
But after the event, a girl came up to me and said something the lines of, “if you don’t want people to judge you, you shouldn’t be prejudiced towards others”.
I have to admit, at first I was embarrassed but that taught me a huge lesson about how our mind works.
Not letting external judgment affect you helps to boost your confidence
After changing my perception, I’ve felt less insecure and a lot happier. There’s no more burden of caring (too much) about other’s perspective of me.
There could be people bad-mouthing me this second. Who knows?
What I do know and can control is my effort towards improving myself. And if I just focus on being a better person, levelling up my skills and developing my craft, the results will show for itself.
Treat people the way you’d want to be treated
When I’m out with my friend (let’s call her Karen), she always tells me she fears people would make fun of the way she dresses. So, she will always take hours to get ready even if we are meeting at a mall opposite her place.
And while we wait for coffee, she will stare at others and make preconceptions based on their dressing.
I tried so hard to make her see she’s being the person that she’s afraid of.
She doesn’t want people to have an opinion about her based on how she dressed yet she does the same to others. And because she’s constantly judging others, she subconsciously feels others are doing the same to her.
So before you expect someone to treat a certain way, change the way you behave towards them.
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This post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.
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