“Who you are when no one is watching still matters more than you know.” That was a tweet by a friend the other day, and it got me thinking about how we care so much about other people’s perceptions of us. We often forget about ourselves, and how we view ourselves. Our lives are then dictated by what others think of us instead of what we want to do or who we want to be.
We spend more time with ourselves than any other human being on earth – 24/7 in our heads. Whether consciously or not, we are there listening to every single thought, making every choice, convincing ourselves of every move, and scrutinising everything we do and sometimes the mistakes we’ve made.
A lot of us take our self-awareness for granted, by either ignoring it or neglecting it. We go through life never realising the importance of knowing and having a relationship with oneself, and we place more importance on our external relationships like we don’t exist or matter, but we do.
Even when making mistakes, we tend to find ourselves looking first to see if anyone saw us; hoping no one judges us, and if they do, we hope and beg they forgive us before even thinking about forgiving ourselves. Thoughts like “what do they think of me?”, and “what will people say?”, become the first question; sometimes the only question we care to know the answer to. But what about ourselves? Truth is, we may never be fully forgiven by others, but that does not mean that we cannot find inner peace by forgiving and loving ourselves anyway.
The internal relationship you have with yourself sets the tone for all external relationships in your life. How you view and treat yourself affects how you view and treat others and the way you view yourself amongst them, making this the single most important relationship in our lives.
Look first for forgiveness for yourself from within yourself, before you seek it from others. There is nothing erroneous about prioritising others but think of yourself as well. Instead of pretending and trying to prove to the next person how good of a person you are for the sake of their opinion of you, work toward being someone you actually like spending time with, then it won’t matter what the opinions of others are. These are just some of the things that have helped me build a healthy relationship with myself.
Will Smith once said we have to let go of who we want people to think we are. This is particularly true because we will never be able to control what others think, only what we think of ourselves. For if we don’t like the person we are, it won’t matter who does. That makes each of us the most powerful being in our own world. By its very nature, what you think of yourself ultimately trumps anyone else’s opinion, and for that reason, we can’t keep on ignoring ourselves.
* Paula Christoph’s column concentrates on positive and inspirational write-ups every second Friday in the New Era newspaper.