Letting Others Control You

You care what other people think of you. That concern can quietly steer what you say and how you act from one moment to the next, because the feelings you seem to stir in others start to feel like your responsibility. Owning what you actually do to people, and living with the real consequences, that part matters. But being so unsure of yourself that you drift wherever the next opinion or emotional reaction pushes you is a different thing entirely.

So, who are you? Do you actually know? Staying even tempered and calm gets you a long way. Most of us carry a quiet inner voice that has a sense of what we ought to do, and the question is whether you listen to it or to everyone around you. Some people call that voice instinct, others call it intuition. When someone has lost touch with it, decisions become agony. They second guess every choice. They hold back their opinion until they have heard what the room thinks first, then go along with whatever that turns out to be.

People marvel at how others manage to stay composed. Part of it is knowing your own triggers: what sets you off, what you can't resist, what you've convinced yourself you simply must have. In truth we need very little. We just think we need a great deal more, and that belief got planted in us by how we were raised and by the society around us. Anthropologists have described groups living with almost none of what we call necessities here in the "civilized" world, and those people come across as content, even happy, with their lives.

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