At Least Do Not Lie to Yourself: “What Will People Say?”

AVAlexander Volchek

What will people say? What will people say? What will Mom say? What will Dad say? What will my husband say? What will my wife say? What will my friends say? What will people at work say if I do anything in my life? Absolutely any action starts to worry us. What will they say? It is like posting a story and looking at it endlessly to see whether people have liked it. That is another side of “What will people say?” Why does someone else's opinion interest a person so much? Why does it interest you so much? What will another person say about your own action? What is at the root of all this? How do you resolve it? How do you get rid of this obsessive question hanging over your actions? How do you gain inner peace and faith in yourself? You begin showing your weakness where you shouldn't show it. These relationships turn into a situation in which people deteriorate badly. People often lose each other because of it. These are different colors of life. Life is no longer black and white; it is colorful, beautiful, full. Observing this state lets you feel your own strength and confidence on a scale you don't even know exists. You have the sense that you know what it means to believe in yourself. But that is an illusion.

You know how to believe in yourself at a level of ten points or a hundred. I suggest believing in yourself at a level of a hundred thousand, finding the way to that hundred thousand, to that million or billion emotions. This is an incredibly powerful opportunity for growth. There is a very deep subject that concerns practically everyone throughout their life. What will other people say if you take a particular action? What will your parents say? What will your friends say? What will your husband or wife say? What will people at work say? What will your partners say? What will unknown people, strangers, say? What will this person I've never seen in my life say? A person worries about other people's opinions wherever they are. They worry about a kind of virtual opinion without understanding the nature of the worry at all. There is an interesting paradox here: a person starts worrying about another person's nonexistent opinion. I pictured sitting and watching television—a movie or the news—and worrying about what the person in the movie thinks. Essentially, even worrying about what our parents, acquaintances, or people at work will think is on that same plane: what the people in the movie will think.

They aren't real. Why aren't they real? We'll examine that today. Most importantly, learning to work with your worry is an incredible opportunity for your own development and growth. It will let you develop in a completely different way: to move tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold in your perception of what is happening and of your own possibilities. You spend an enormous amount of time—a person spends an enormous amount of time—not taking action or making the right decisions, but worrying. It is important to look at this first aspect. The energy and strength spent on this worry aren't merely resources you could have used to do something else. They produce the opposite effect. We stir up the person who, we imagine, has certain expectations or might think something wrong. You worry about what Dad will say, what Mom will say, what your husband or wife will say. We create a cycle of very difficult consequences for ourselves. Why does that happen? First and foremost, because you aren't in a state of faith in yourself.

It sounds simple, doesn't it? You tell someone, “You just don't believe in yourself.” They say, “No, I do believe in myself.” Any worry about what another person thinks is, first and foremost, guaranteed to be connected with your own self-confidence and your understanding of who you are, what you really can do, and what you really cannot do. This worry often triggers a kind of aggression: a person says, “Other opinions don't interest me at all, under any circumstances.” That is the same worry. When it shifts to “No opinion matters to me at all,” it is the same type of worry, just with a slightly different character. Your self-confidence is reacting in the opposite way: a kind of exaggerated, unreal confidence, a very powerfully inflated ego. Notice that a person who lacks self-confidence has a strong ego in any case, and often treats badly the very people with whom they should have a very good relationship: people who trust them and are ready to help. But because of this spoiled ego, they try to place themselves above those people.

Essentially, they could ask these people for help. They could ask them for advice; they could speak with them completely honestly. Instead, they shut themselves off and show that these people's opinions don't concern them, that they don't care who does what. In effect, they are displaying a very strong ego. You see this very often. On the other hand, with people you shouldn't be open with—because they want to take advantage of you, because they want to harm you as a person—you behave in the opposite way: very accommodatingly. You show the other side of the ego. For the sake of this particular person and their particular behavior, you begin showing your weakness where you shouldn't show it. At that moment, showing weakness gives an even stronger push to their message that you won't succeed in life. These people whose opinions you await, these people with whom you become weak, drive your own uncertainty about whether you will succeed even deeper into you, like a hammer driving in a nail.

This is a very difficult subject. It is fundamental, fundamental, very important. We'll now discuss how to avoid being caught in this situation again and instead perceive things very broadly, because this is a very difficult subject. What does it mean not to believe in yourself? The question here isn't that there are other people and expectations of other people. Fundamentally, it is that you don't believe in yourself. But first, let's examine expectations of other people again. When we expect something from another person, we harm that person. We communicate, interact, make agreements, and live with them in a mode that definitely isn't real development. Instead, we are constantly narrowing a corridor. We follow a script already written in a book, because together we are afraid to take a step to the left or right into real life, to let life flow. After many years, our trauma doesn't come to light; it intensifies. We still don't become aware of it. We can't arrive at a state of peace together. Very often, people lose each other. These relationships don't develop into relationships of growth in which people mature.

These relationships develop into a state in which people deteriorate badly in the way they interact with each other. People often lose each other because of it. There is a very important point here, a key point: another person may have a different opinion

not because they are worse or better than you, but because they have different goals in life and a different worldview. Let me explain with a very simple example. Imagine that you want to measure up professionally, in business, for example. It is a popular subject. Many people want to have their own business. Some don't. You want to measure up to a particular entrepreneur, and you wait for feedback from them so that they will agree with and acknowledge your own behavior. But what matters to you is doing work you love in your business, work that gives you a creative impulse every day. To this entrepreneur, all that matters is making money, regardless of how, regardless of what the business involves—even if it harms other people. Your inner expectations will never align. You are interested in this person's opinion, but they have a completely different life, completely different circumstances. You won't be in sync. For example, one person will say, “To gain freedom over your time, you have to work very hard, fifteen to twenty hours a day. Once you've worked that hard, you'll gain freedom from time constraints, and then you'll be able to spend time with your family.” This person even has a family—two children, for example.

And they say, “I've gained freedom over my time. Look, I spend time with my child twice a month.” You look at them and realize that this is all wrong for you: you don't want to spend time with your child just twice a month. Your inner desire for interacting with your child is completely different. You want to be with this child, live with them, develop alongside them, with the child developing beside you. You want this to be your full life. It isn't a matter of two days, of those Saturdays, of occasionally. You want a life in which the question of whether you spend a lot or a little time with your child doesn't arise at all. It is a very interesting paradox. I see many quite capable people. I would like to be able to do some things they do successfully. But then I hear what they say about family relationships, for example, or children, or their time, and I realize that it is a completely different world. The question of whether I spend a lot or a little time with my four children never arises for me. The question itself doesn't arise.

My inner feeling is that our lives are joined together. There is no question of a lot or a little. Everything happens very harmoniously and naturally. It doesn't matter whether I spent eight hours with them that day or just saw them in the morning or evening. How do I sense them? How do I pay attention to them? How do I interact with them, even when I see this person for thirty seconds? How do I think about their state? Do I experience them as a person, or just as someone who ran past me? When I look at them, do I see fear in myself because I don't understand how they are developing? Or is this simply a full life for me? That worry about too little time, lost time, or a missed opportunity is primarily connected with worrying about what will happen twenty, thirty, or fifteen years from now. Essentially, you aren't in a state of life and harmony, and you aren't truly making the right decision. Very often, this happens through expectations of other people. Let's look again at this important part, this important part. Imagine us interacting with people in life.

There are two kinds of encounters. On one side, we meet people who want to take advantage of us. Their opinion isn't really the issue at all. We are interested in the opinion of someone whose approach to us is, from the outset, to take advantage of us. On the other side, there are people who want to help. It is very important to pay attention to this and remember it. This is an incredibly important adjustment: you need to be very careful with people who want to take advantage of you, because we live in the twenty-first century, and this happens within today's social conventions. With them, you need to be—not exactly closed off, but on your guard, and definitely not preoccupied with what their opinion will be. Why? If someone wants to take advantage of you and you show that their opinion matters to you, then you become... Let me say it again: it damages you enormously. It is a double blow. On one side, you are interested in this person's opinion; you want to change it. You want them to agree with you without fail. That puts pressure on you. This energy puts pressure on you one hundred percent, because it is directed against humanity itself.

On the other side, that person wants to take advantage of you and puts even more pressure on you. Here, one plus one equals a hundred in pressure. It is very hard. At that moment, you begin feeling worse. There is another side: you meet people who truly want to help you, sincerely, who are open toward you. Your ego appears here. With these people, your insecurity says, “Now I'll show them that I really believe in myself, that I'm confident.” It transforms. You put even more pressure on this person. Now you want to take advantage of them, and you also want to impose your opinion on them. Once again, you receive a double blow in return. First, you make things worse for the other person. When you make things worse for someone else, you will one hundred percent create a problem for yourself and be punished. I've said it before and will keep saying it: one of the most important opportunities for a person's growth—for your development as a person, for the development of your entire life, your whole state and experience—is how you treat other people. It is one of the fundamental things at the root, at the root. In this second case, when you respond by putting pressure on someone who came to you with kindness, it happens automatically. You simply don't trust them on a mental and physical level. You automatically distrust a person you should trust.

When these actions repeat year after year, a kind of robot develops inside you, a robot that can't recognize good people at all. A robot that can't recognize love. A robot that can't—doesn't even feel love directed toward it. A robot that doesn't feel nature. A robot that can't convey love to the people around it. This is very difficult. Because of it, your loved ones begin to suffer, your acquaintances begin to suffer, your children begin to suffer—or your future children will suffer, or you won't have children at all. Resolving this will become harder and harder with every year, because you have driven yourself into an enormous dead end, an immense dead end. Again, the first thing to do is understand this structure and begin consciously observing it, because you aren't confident in yourself, and you know it. You actually know it. If you start examining it deeply, you feel it. Most likely, if you've watched this video up to this point, if you've been able to watch this kind of video, you know it and feel it. How do you bring it into a place where you can believe and understand that you aren't confident in yourself?

That will give you the strength to be honest and truthful with the people you should be open with, and to understand whose opinion really matters. The opinions of certain people really do matter. And you will understand whose opinion doesn't matter. Here is an interesting question: how do you find the people whose opinion truly matters?

At this point, many people might say, “Whose opinion matters? Who is it essential to have a very good relationship with? Mom or Dad, for example, or your husband or wife, or your partner.” But that isn't so. What I've been discussing, and will continue discussing, concerns people as a whole, not particular roles. Some parental behavior is completely unacceptable: a parent is in a state they will remain in until the end of their life. They have hammered you down your whole life, like a nail under a hammer. They hammer you down and will keep doing it, whatever happens to you, whatever you show them, prove, explain, or say. They will keep doing what they've always done. The worst conclusion you can reach is that your current result—if you succeed at something, for example, having a good family... A good family: what does that mean? A large family at this moment, let's say. Assessing whether a family is good or bad is very difficult. You need a period of time, at least twenty or thirty years. Or perhaps you manage to earn a lot of money, or achieve some social status.

You say, “I achieved this social status because my parents pressured me.” That is the worst conclusion you could possibly draw. You are directing your gratitude toward the very thing that hammers you down even more. If you truly live and truly feel, at some point it becomes practically impossible to live with that. When you understand what is really happening inside, it is enormously destructive, especially when you interact with that person. I am in no way saying that you should completely stop communicating with parents who hammer you down. You need to be aware of it. You simply need to recognize it, see it, and at certain moments not allow it to happen. But it is important that you personally don't make the mistake of opening up your feelings to this person, because they will take advantage of it in any case, and in any case—in any case—drive that nail in further. I am in no way taking away from the idea that love, compassion, and kindness should be conveyed to absolutely everyone. You simply need to understand whether you have the strength to do it. You may be able to convey compassion and love to thousands of people, but meeting one particular person can wound your psyche: you can't bear it, and you lose control with that person.

Very often, doing this is incredibly hard, incredibly hard. I want to say something very important at the end of this video, something that may bring up very different emotions and states. You will never resolve the issue of expectations of other people in a single day. You won't even resolve it in a month. Most likely, you won't resolve it over years of your life. It is a fundamental human characteristic that will remain within you. You should in no way put a positive spin on it. Remember that it is there. It will run through your entire life. But if you begin observing this state, becoming aware of it, being in it calmly, and acknowledging it, it will lead you more and more toward expanding your own perception. These are different colors of life. Life is no longer black and white; it is colorful, beautiful, full. You can live your life thinking everything is great while feeling bad. Observing this state lets you feel your own strength and confidence on a scale you don't even know exists. You have the sense that you know what it means to believe in yourself. But that is an illusion.

You know how to believe in yourself at a level of ten points or a hundred. I suggest believing in yourself at a level of a hundred thousand, finding the way to that hundred thousand, to that million or billion emotions. This is an incredibly powerful opportunity for growth. You're on Alexander Volchek's channel about growth, about growing as a person. Be sure to subscribe and support the channel. It really helps the channel move forward, and of course it helps me, too. Thank you very much.