Do Not Care So Much About What Other People Think

Elizabeth Weintraub does not really care what other people think.

You can never be freely yourself if you care too much about what other people think. Oh, sure, easy for you to say, is the standard response I get when I give people solid advice who want to pluck excuses out of their butt as supposedly logical reasons why they can’t take my advice. You can do it but I can’t because blah, blah, blah. You’re this and I’m that. And they are right. They can’t do it, because they refuse.

There is fear. They feel a need to conform. There is comfort in conformity. And they care too much about what other people think. For starters, people don’t think all that much about others anyway because people are way too busy thinking about themselves. And people all harbor different opinions, ideas. They will interpret your actions in ways you haven’t begun to imagine.

A wise person many years ago told me it’s none of my business what other people think. I’ve always tried to hold true to that statement. It is none of my business what you think of me. You are free to form your own judgments. I thought of all this when I asked by a writer for Crain’s Sacramento to share a mistake and the lesson learned. At that particular moment, under a cabana, lounging on an Hawaiian beach, I could think of nothing better to talk about than this subject:

Do not care so much about what other people think.

Real estate agents, especially, are guilty, guilty as sin. Ask any if they would be willing to put themselves out there, maybe by taking a stand on a controversy, and they fret over the possibility of alienation on the horizon. Many in sales will exchange integrity for business in a heartbeat. They don’t want to offend. So they don’t divulge anything they feel could cause a potential client to hire another agent, and it doesn’t bother them to slip into a vanilla coma.

I find myself often talking to the wall when I advise agents to be themselves. Oh sure, easy for you to say. If you are yourself, you will attract other people just like you. You probably won’t attract the people who will disagree, fight, annoy, be mean or otherwise try to cut your throat. (Unless you’re that sort of person.) Just be who you are. Your own unique self, and you’ll find plenty of birds of a feather.

Don’t care so much about what other people think, and people will gravitate toward you. You can read more about that in an interview I gave while lying on a beach last week in Hawaii to Crain’s Sacramento, If I Knew Then.