Some advice for those trying to please everyone

People treat you “strangely”. This applies equally to your co-workers, an occasional taxi driver, or former colleagues you haven’t seen in 10 years. “Just say, ‘What do I care?'” is the most obvious and stupid advice that can be given in such a situation. Of course, you understand how absurd it is to worry about each person’s sympathy, but what changes? In this article, we’ll talk about psychological tricks that will really help you get back to reality.

O awesome.club hopes that following these 5 approaches can give you a sense of inner balance.

Clinical psychologist, Dr. Roger Covin, in his book The Need to be Liked (in free translation: The Need to Please), advises people to imagine themselves in the form of inkblots similar to those used in the famous Rorschach test. “What a person sees in the stains characterizes him and not the paint. As with the way we perceive each other, the same qualities will attract certain people and at the same time irritate others.”

For example, what one person perceives as self-confidence, another will describe as superb. Honesty can be highly valued on the one hand and considered unforgivable and rude on the other. We tend to see in people what is in us: aspirations, preferences, flaws and fears.

Transparency and simplicity can be your strength. But if your interlocutor is used to being very afraid of sincerity, there is a high probability that he will see you as a big liar or just a fake person. And you will have to accept that.

According to Covin, in addition to the individual himself, there are many other factors of varying degrees of scale and duration that affect how other people treat him.

Problems at work, family disputes, or elementary discomfort persistently attract attention. Even if someone mistreats you, often these emotions aren’t directed at anyone specific. There are thousands of reasons that are unknown and not up to you for someone to be angry. It’s not wrong sometimes to remember your own insignificance.

The Doctor. Covin is also very skeptical of his patients’ manifestations of “telepathy” who claim to know exactly when others think ill of them.

There are two more frequent effects that people often experience. The first is personalization, when we consider ourselves the cause of everything that is happening. The second is “catastrophizing” when we interpret the facts in the worst possible way.

For example, we hear co-workers laugh and we immediately think they are talking about our appearance or behavior (of course, as if they have no other topic of conversation!). In most cases, we don’t even have time to notice when we start to “imagine”, it happens automatically. And anxiety, meanwhile, grows in proportion to our active imagination.

You can tackle this with the help of a sensitive and reflective introspection🇧🇷 “What do I perceive as a reality? Can I see it in a different way? How objective am I?“It would be helpful to analyze your own thoughts before, during, and after that same conversation and notice what things might skew your perception.

In general, people cannot face uncertainty. If someone doesn’t behave in an obvious friendly or aggressive way, most of us find it very difficult to “compute” them.

At the end, We often confuse a neutral attitude with a negative one.🇧🇷 This is especially true for those who suffer from high “rejection sensitivity.”

“If there are no obvious signs, a person starts to rely completely on their sense of the world,” says Ozlem Ayduk, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. If in your version of the universe you feel that people are inclined to reject you, you will see a person involved in their own affairs as if they intentionally ignore you and avoid contact.

As in the previous paragraph, we must strive to return to reality and not allow the imagination to drive us crazy.

Another trick Covin likes to practice with his patients: he proposes that each see themselves on a global scale. “Imagine you could communicate with all 7 billion people on the planet for a week. How many of them will say that they generally like you?” With those who say an incredibly low or high percentage, Covin works separately. For those closest to reality, such an exercise serves as an excellent reminder that the possibility of meeting people who don’t love us is an inevitable part of life.

Covin himself estimated its level of “attractiveness” at 70%. “That means that 30% of people don’t like me and 30% of the 7 billion people are 2.1 billion people”, says the psychologist. They are everywhere. Keep in mind for a moment that everything is against you: people are not going to love you. Many people. And this is absolutely normal.