Shadé Zahrai

And if you are so attached to the approval of other people, you will not take risks.

Because what if they say this about me?

What will they think?

Fascinatingly, when we look at failure, failure is often only feared

not because of the failure itself, but because of what other people will think if I fail.

What will they think about me?

What will that say about me?

And so we internalize what we think other people will say about us, even before it's happened, and then we hold ourselves back so we don't take the risk, which means, of course, we don't fail, but we're stuck and we're shrinking our lives.

You don't know what people are thinking.

You know, there was this study, this classic study that was done many years ago where they gave people a very obnoxious looking shirt, T-shirt, and they asked them to go and walk around in public.

And then they came back and reported how they felt.

And many of them reported feeling judged.

They felt insecure.

They felt like people were staring at them.

But then when they actually went and interviewed these other people, no one even noticed.

So it's called the spotlight effect.

We feel like other people are paying a lot more attention to us than they actually are.

But they're all caught up in their own lives and their own challenges and their own inner critics and their own self-criticism and fear of failure.

And people are complex.

have a lot going on and so when you remind yourself that hey people actually don't care about you as much as you care about yourself they're worrying about their own things the other thing which i think is really empowering is to ask yourself okay well let's say they don't like me they disapprove of me they disagree with something so what so what what actually would happen