It’s not your job to make everyone like you
I have become a fan of the BuzzFeed Life. It gives advice on a range of topics. There are always posts that i want to be able to share and i see this tumblr as a place to do so! Here goes -
http://www.buzzfeed.com/juliegerstein/its-not-your-job-to-make-everyone-like-you#.jxv6OQNQ1
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It’s hard to be a person. Especially a person who wants love, which is something most of us do. It can make us spin and turn and coagulate into warped versions of ourselves.
It is hard to be a person, let alone a person who wants love. It can cause us to spin out and become different versions of ourselves.
It’s not your job to make everyone like you. This is not only impossible, but trying will make you exhausted and make you feel less like yourself. Leaving yourself uncomfortable and confused.
Your work in life is to take care of yourself. Imagine what would happen if you liked yourself enough that it didn’t bother you if everyone didn’t like you? And to find the people who will let you do that and support you in it.
Your work in life is to support them, too.
This doesn’t mean you have to like or agree with everything they do. It just means stretching in the way of compassion, of kindness, of speaking to them like you’d want to be spoken to and treating them like you’d like to be treated.
There’s this arbitrary value on “niceness,” but niceness is often false and painful. It puts us in the position of being dishonest sometimes, of squelching out our own inner voices leaving us in a place we may not want to be in.
It requires a lot of emotional labor to sublimate your own feelings. And that’s exhausting.
Instead of being nice, focus on being true and honest, but compassionate with yourself and others. It is not compassionate to be fake-nice.
Focus, too, on being kind — to yourself and others.
Please know it is OK not to be liked by everyone, and not to like everyone. Figuring out what and who you like actually means you are becoming more yourself.
By defining what you like/love and don’t, you are self-actualizing and evolving into the real you.
And that’s a very good thing.
