Everyone Is Looking At Me

You're listening to The Uppercase Life, where the next choice you make might be the best choice you've made all day. And I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. Imagine your friend invites you to a social function. You walk into a crowded room and the entire experience is far more formal than you realize. People seem to be dressed nice, and they also appear to be maybe more wealthy and important than you.
And suddenly, you're very aware of the outfit that you chose for that occasion. And you just start feeling nervous. Maybe you weren't dressed well enough. Maybe you aren't in the right social class to be at this event. Any time we're acting under the watchful eye of the public, we have a heightened level of awareness of our own activities.
And, you know, we are highly social beings, so our brains understand intuitively the advantages of belonging to a tribe. It's important to fit into a social situation and to make good connections with others. These things are going to help us in the future on our journey. So it's natural to want to impress people and want to put our best foot forward.
We certainly don't want to damage our possibility at making good connections, maybe even finding love, or just generally garnering respect. This, though, can cause some unintended side effects, and depending on your personality type, this might range from being a minor inconvenience to a major problem for you in your life. You see, when we start thinking so hard about what everyone else is thinking about us, a few things tend to happen.
We tend to be more risk averse, which means we don't want to try things that we think will make us fail. We also are less likely to experiment for some of the same reasons. We don't want to try something new, something no one ever has seen before, because maybe they will like it. Who knows? But one of the most important things is we become more aware of our own perceived flaws.
Just overall, we become more self-conscious. And there's a line that our brain tells us. And it's important for us to identify this lie because it's a very natural one for our brain to tell us. But it also can be really crippling for our endeavors on a daily basis. And that lie is this if people see me fail, they're going to lose respect for me.
They're going to hate me, and things will not go well. But, you know, the truth is and surveys and data show this to be a fact that we generally respect people who we consider are genuine, who are vulnerable, and who are willing to admit their flaws. But there's something that comes into play when it's us in the spotlight.
It's called the spotlight effect. This idea that what people see when they look at us is more negative and more scrutinizing than it actually is. The truth is, we look at ourselves in the mirror and we can see every flaw. All of those aspects of ourself, whether they are physical, whether they are personality driven or mental. These are things that we think, you know, I wish I could change that or improve it.
And when we know that people are looking at us, those things bubbled to the top of our mind. And we start thinking, everyone sees in me what I see in me. But the truth is, they don't. For the same reason that you do not see them as being is flawed as they see themselves. Because we all have this bent for being a little self centric in that we are really concerned about us, how we appear, what people think of us.
And while we are thinking so much about ourselves, we're not actually paying as much attention to those other people and their flaws. The fact that people are thinking of us as hard and as deep as we're thinking of ourself in this particular instance is actually a positive thing because it means that if you do fail, even if we're talking a small public blooper, if you trip and you fall in an event, or if you fail on a larger scale, let's say you've started a business, you've had an idea, you've tried a thing, and it didn't really work out.
And you feel a sense of guilt or embarrassment thinking that isn't the way that I intended things to go. And I feel like I look a little bit stupid. You feel that way. But on the whole, most of the people around you are not taking your failure nearly as personally as you're taking it, which means that you have the freedom to get back up and try again and people aren't going to hold it against you as much as you think they're going to hold it against you.
In fact, if you can be humble, if you can be honest and vulnerable about your flaws and about the failures you've experienced, it actually builds respect in those people. They look at you and they think, What a relatable person. Because after all, it's very difficult to relate to somebody who has no flaws. I mean, it's not something I can relate very well to.
And you probably couldn't either. And this is where you can set yourself apart from most of the rest of the world. Understand this truth. Don't allow the gaze of others to paralyze you on the whole. Just remember, they don't care as much as you do. And this is actually to your advantage. You can fail. You can make mistakes and more than you think, without severely damaging your reputation and your failures.
And how you choose to respond to those failures may actually build their respect for you rather than destroy it. So if you find yourself in a situation where you can identify that you becoming very self-conscious and that spotlight effect is taking over, check your attitude, go ahead and have a little confidence, have some good humor, connect with other people.
And imagine that the most important thing in their mind is how you are perceiving them. Give them a little grace and give yourself a little grace along the way as well. And I think you'll find that you'll be more willing to try new things, cool things, and you'll find that you can get more done. If you can stop thinking so hard about what other people might be thinking about you.
Thank you for joining me on the show today. I hope you are living your life all caps bowls. But if you're struggling with something or have questions, please reach out to me at [email protected]. And if this content is helpful for you, consider leaving us a good rating or sharing it with a friend, which helps other people find it as well.
And until next time. Live like it matters.