I Heart Me by David Hamilton Page B

that’s congruent with healthy self-worth, the brain networks connected with our lack of self-love will simply dissolve.

Chapter 5
    Does It Matter If People Like You?
    â€˜I’m a rose whether I’m admired or not. I’m a rose whether anyone’s crazy about me or not.’
    S ERDAR Ö ZKAN
    I spoke at a conference in Las Vegas in 2007, shortly after my first book was published. It felt like my big break and I wanted it to go well. At one point during a story that I was telling, a man in the front row was laughing so hard he fell right off his chair and landed in the aisle, still in hysterics. I saw him and immediately felt on a high.
    A split second later, a man on the far left of me also caught my attention. While it seemed that everyone in the auditorium was laughing, he had a bored, stern look on his face. My own face flushed. I lost concentration. If it wasn’t for the fact that when people are laughing you can say almost anything and get away with it, I would have crash-landed right there. There were only 10 minutes of my talk left, so even though I stumbled through it, I don’t think anyone else noticed.
    Later that evening, as we sat having drinks, my partner, Elizabeth, told me how proud she was of me and how people were stopping her and telling her what a great talk I’d given. You’d think I’d be on a high, wouldn’t you? I certainly had moments of internal celebration, but my mind kept returning to the man on my left who hadn’t been smiling. My face flushed each time I thought of him. I wondered if I’d offended him. I ran through bits of my presentation in my mind, looking for anything that could offend, but I found none. I wondered if he was a university professor or a sceptic who had taken offence to the fact that I bridge mainstream science with self-help, alternative medicine and spirituality. I hoped I wouldn’t run into him in case he was aggressive. You know how I was around aggressive people!
    As you may gather, this was a time in my life when I was overly concerned with whether people liked me or not. I suspect you’ve behaved in much the same way in your own life. We are, after all, only human.
Cut Yourself a Little Slack
    It’s been said that you shouldn’t be concerned with whether people like you or not, only with whether you like yourself or not.
    I like those words and I suspect you do too. There’s something comforting in them, something that feels true. Perhaps it’s the sense of light at the end of the tunnel.
    I think this is why we all like quotes so much. They remind us of wisdom we know but usually forget in our day-to-day life. Words like these give us hope and remind us of who we want to be and how we want to be.
    To be unconcerned with what people think of you is a worthy goal to have. But it’s also OK to cut yourself some slack and not get annoyed at yourself when you are concerned.
    It’s normal to want people to like you. So long as you’re not obsessed with it, it’s quite healthy, because it means you’ll be aware of your own behaviour. How would the world be if we all just kept on being ourselves with no regard whatsoever for the impact of our behaviour on others?
    The key is to have a healthy awareness of how others may perceive us, but not to adopt their opinions as our own unless we can honestly see some truth in them. Some of us get the idea that to be happy, or enlightened, we need to be 100 per cent unconcerned about what people think of us. But living with absolutes like this is only setting ourselves up for not being enough: if we’re not 100 per cent free of people’s opinions of us, we’ve failed, or if we don’t feel enough 100 per cent of the time, we’ve failed.
    But life is not black or white, nor is it something in between. Life kind of floats from black to white and white to black, dances a little on the grey, splurges in yellows and oranges,