One of my favorite holidays is New Year’s Day. It’s a contemplative, peaceful day for me, and I typically spend time reviewing the past year, and setting my intentions for the new year. This year I’ve been thinking a lot about the quote “Other people’s thoughts are not your business”, ascribed to everyone from the Buddha to Marcus Aurelius to Lisa Nichols, Regina Brett, and Steve Harvey to name just a few!
Regardless of the original source, there is wisdom in this concept. From a cognitive-behavioral perspective, one of the reasons it holds up is because other people don’t have “all of the data” included in your life and decisions, so how can they accurately judge your situation at any given moment? And with the hundreds of people we encounter in the world each year, there are just too many people we encounter to give each of them that kind of influence. We simply can’t afford our perspective to be pulled in every direction possible by someone else’s thoughts or perspective.
And I don't know about you, but the opposite is also true: I wouldn't want all of MY thoughts to be made other people's business arbitrarily!
People pleasing is one of the ways we make other people's thoughts our business. At its core, people pleasing simply means “I let go of my center, needs, and perspective in service of what I assume are your needs and perspective”. The motivations for people pleasing can range from hoping other people will like us or take care of us more if we please them, to misperceiving people pleasing as a form of true caretaking. But regardless of the motivation, excessive people pleasing ultimately becomes an impossible task because frankly, there are simply too many people to please them all. And most importantly, people pleasing pulls us off of focus because we are no longer paying attention to our own perspective, needs, and values. In this way, people pleasing disrupts intimacy as it prevents others from actually knowing us.
One of my intentions for 2024 is to not expend ANY energy on mind reading or adjusting to people’s unexpressed thoughts, concerns, or opinions. That doesn’t mean I won’t consider other people’s expressed opinions, with the caveat that they come from someone who has earned my trust. But in order to take better emotional care of myself in 2024, I will remind myself daily that other people’s thoughts are truly none of my business.