Remaining unaffected by how people perceive you

Everyone of us wake up in the morning go about doing our chores, dress up well, socialize etc. If you notice carefully, there is one thing that is common in all what we do and say. It is how people perceive you for what you are and your actions.

Thinking about it in further more detail, we would be alarmed to discover the effect of people's perception about us have on us. If we get a lot of compliments from others about us, that drastically improves our mood for the day. If we hear lot of derogatory remarks from others about us, that spoils our mood for the day.

The question to be answered is, why on earth does the comment of some one else be it positive or negative have an effect on you. Psychologically speaking, any mood is a state of our own mind and not about what people think about you. But, the exact opposite seems to be happening in every one's life.

I am not trying to advocate rudeness in behavior or encouraging everyone to be a loner. Of course, it is important to be amongst people and that is precisely why it is said 'man is a social animal.' However, a social animal need not be an animal that is a slave to the society.

Everything that happens in this world is not because of what others do to you or what others do not do to you. It is because of how to you take things. This is precisely what teachers of ancient karate tried to preach. The enemy to be conquered is not your opponent. The real enemy is within you.

Taking cue from this and applying it to our daily lives, we can pretty much understand that it is we who decide how happy we are, how sad we are, how handsome/beautiful we look and how well we live our lives. It is not the perceptions of people that decide it.

When we start getting into the habit of thinking primarily about what people will think, how they will perceive you, you will end up living a life without having done anything that you wanted to do and not even earning a good reputation from people. Because, irrespective of what you do people will still rack their brains to find out something wrong in to speak about partly because most people are so jobless and partly to satisfy their self ego. Self ego is satisfied when one feels better about himself/herself in comparison to the others. When the find fault in you, they feel faultless at least relatively faultless and that gives them a false sense of self-confidence by which they feel good.