How to Stop Stop Caring What People Think | Ep319

How to Stop Stop Caring What People Think | Ep319

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Vanessa: My daughter turned two this year, and lately I catch myself watching her the way that you would watch someone who has a secret that you used to know, because she hasn't learned yet that she's supposed to perform for anyone. She does whatever she wants, trust me, whatever she wants just because she wants to do it. And my son, who's now in middle school, lost that somewhere around third, fourth, or fifth grade.

And this week is my birthday, and I am well established in my mid-40s, and I'm noticing something that actually surprised me, and that is that I'm starting to get some of that "secret" back.

You're listening to the Free To Be Mindful podcast, the space for high-achieving women who give their best to everyone and are ready to keep some of it for themselves. I'm Vanessa, licensed therapist, speaker, and mom coach. I know what it takes to build a life you're proud of without losing yourself in the process.

Each week, we get honest about ambition, identity, and the parts of ourselves that we quietly set aside. Here we [00:01:00] go

Vanessa: hello and welcome to episode 319 of the Free to Be Mindful podcast. I hope that you're feeling good, looking good, and doing better in this world than you were yesterday.

So here's what I've noticed. It's not that I woke up one day and decided that other people's opinions just didn't matter. It's that somewhere along the way, the stakes just seem to change?

Sometimes I'll tell you, I get not so nice comments on social media. Maybe you've caught one, especially if you're watching me on YouTube. And a decade ago, I would've replayed that comment over and over in my head for days. And now I just block the person and I keep it moving because I just don't allow it to take up real estate in my brain anymore.

And when I really think about why that shift happened, it usually traces back to something breaking first.

We don't just arrive at not caring. That's usually formed and shaped by something that we've survived, right? By something that maybe we thought that we would not survive. And once you've lived through your [00:02:00] actual worst case scenario and you're still standing, a stranger's opinion just doesn't carry the same weight that it used to anymore.

And the fear just loses its teeth, so to speak, because that thing that it was protecting you from already happened, and you made it through, so you just keep it moving.

And I think about this with the work that I do with clients constantly. A teenager who's terrified of being laughed at or being left out hasn't yet had the experience at being laughed at or being fully left out and surviving it fully intact.

A mom who's devastated by one piece of criticism from her mother-in-law hasn't yet collected enough evidence that she can absorb a hard comment and still know exactly who she is and what kind of mother she is the next morning.

And that evidence only comes through from going through the hard times, right? From living through it and coming out on the other side alive, and not just from being told that it's gonna be okay.

So I wanna ask the real question, and that [00:03:00] is, is it really age that does this? Or is it that somewhere in our 30s and 40s, most of us have already been through the divorce, the layoff, the career we've walked away from and started over, the diagnosis, the loss, the grief, the failure that everyone could see?

These things, albeit hard, they're also survivable, and they turn out to be more survivable than we thought.

And I think that there are really three things happening all at once when we finally let go of caring so much, and none of them have to do with age directly anyway.

And that is first, our circle gets smaller and in turn, more honest. By our forties, a lot of us have quietly let go of relationships that required a performance, and we're left with people whose opinions we trust. So there is less of an audience to perform for in the first place.

And then the second is that maybe we just run out of energy for the performance, because caring about what other people think is [00:04:00] exhausting. It's a full-time, unpaid job at that, and at some point we just get tired in a way that makes us stop, even if we wanted to keep doing it.

And the third one, I think is the one that matters the most, and that is that we finally gather enough evidence about who we are that a stranger's opinions simply can't overwrite that anymore. In our twenties, we just don't have that evidence yet, so an outside opinion can feel like the only information available. But by our forties, we have decades of proof, and proof is a lot harder to argue with than a compliment or even a criticism.

So when we ask, "Well, why can't we just get to this place earlier?" I don't think that the answer is that we're too immature in our twenties and thirties. I think that the honest answer is that This kind of confidence needs evidence, and evidence takes time to collect. And that reframes our whole thinking.

It's not a personal failing that it took this long to get [00:05:00] here. It's just that the project needed more years to actually finish and to get there.

And I say this to moms that I work with all the time. They come in comparing themselves to a friend who seems so settled or so unbothered by what other people think, that they assume that the friend was just born calmer or that they don't have what it takes to do fill in the blank. And usually, that's not the case. It's just that that mom started collecting her evidence maybe earlier through her own version of something breaking her, and finding out that she could indeed survive it.

And there's really no shortcut around that part. But there is real relief in knowing that the timeline was never actually about maturity and that everyone is on their own timeline as well.

And then here's a shift in perspective that probably complicates everything that I just said, but I think that it's worth naming directly. And that is that a lot of us say, "I don't care what people think," long before we actually mean it. Right? We [00:06:00] say it almost as an armor, and sometimes we aren't there yet. We haven't earned that not caring yet. But sometimes it's a way that we try to talk ourselves into a feeling that we haven't fully arrived at yet.

I hear it in my own house already. My son in middle school is right at the age where kids start performing that they do not care. They actually are really good at performing that they don't care, loudly to anyone who will listen. And really working with kids, I understand the why, because announcing that you don't care is so much safer than the alternative, which is admitting that you actually do care and hoping that it turns out okay anyway, when it might sometimes not. and that announcement is its own type of protection.

And I think that adults do a much more polished version of the exact same thing. We post the caption that we say we're done seeking anyone's approval. We tell our friends that we stop caring what our families think of our choices. And sometimes, yes, that [00:07:00] can be true. But sometimes it's really a rehearsal. It's really a line that we're saying out loud specifically because we need to hear ourselves say it, hoping that if we repeat it long enough or loud enough, that it'll stop being a performance and it'll start being real.

And if you have to announce that you don't care, there may be some part of you that's still hoping the room heard you say it, right?

But also, if you have to announce it to get there, girl, keep announcing it. 

So for our guided reflection today, I wanna ask you this question. The next time you catch yourself saying that you don't care what someone else thinks, ask yourself in your inside voice if it's really true yet or if it's something that you're still working toward.

And this week, I want you to notice the one moment where you do, you catch yourself managing and caring about what someone else thinks of you or says of you. But here's the challenge part: I want you to not judge it and to not internalize it, [00:08:00] but just notice it. Ask yourself honestly if whether letting that moment go would cost you anything, or if you can really let go of someone else's opinion and put your opinion in first place, in priority for you.

So amigas, if this resonated today, you can always shoot me an email or you can send me a DM. I am found on all platforms at counselorvdejesus, and let me know what you thought. And if you're really at the not caring part yet, especially if you're a little older and wiser, like I like to believe myself to be, or if you're still working towards it, which is okay too.

And as for me, I am spending my birthday this week, yes, the whole week, doing exactly that, right? Not planning anything around everyone else, but doing just whatever I wanna do in my mid-40s, finally.

 And as always, remember, in a world where you are free to be anything, you're always free to be mindful. Catch you next time. 

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