If you’re confident of your values and what’s truly important to you, you can ride what people think.
Imagine you’re at a really good party with friends, and it gets to 11pm and you start saying your goodbyes. You may have an early start the next day, or perhaps you know from experience how a late night makes you feel whether you’ve had a drink or not. And it’s just not worth it. But whatever the reason you decide to go.
Of course, there’ll be friends that understand and let you go easily.
There’ll be friends that call you a party poop and try all sorts of tactics to persuade you to stay, and make you feel guilty for wanting to leave early.
And then there’ll be the guilt that you put on yourself for leaving early because your friend has put so much effort into the evening, and you don’t want to upset her.
And then there’s the “what will I miss, if I go now?” I might miss something really exciting.
Guilt comes from 2 sources.
The guilt others try to make you feel.
Nobody can make you feel guilty. How people behave and what they say is all about them. Your actions affect them on some level. What you’re about to do – leave the party – doesn’t feel comfortable for them. They won’t know why, so they start to persuade you not to go or make you feel uncomfortable about your actions.
The guilt you put on yourself.
Trying to “mind read” another person’s feelings and what they’re really thinking, is impossible. Yet you do it all the time, and you’ll often modify your behaviour to reduce the negative consequences, to make you feel better.
The above scenario can be replaced with many different situations.
When you know what’s really important to you, your values, and you have the confidence to let go of the guilt, then you become free to act in integrity with yourself......
...... and that's liberating!
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