You can’t make your success contingent on someone else’s reaction. Competing to impress your parents, your spouse, your co-workers, or anybody else will ultimately not be fulfilling. You can’t conform to their every hope and expectation, and you will experience great frustration when your accomplishments prove insufficient to gain their approval.
If you start with a respect for what you can do that depends on no one else, you will have a much easier time tolerating those for whom nothing is enough.
“It’s a vicious cycle,” reports educator Sally Tucci. Every day she watches inner-city children compete with one another to see who can learn less. “Somewhere along the way they failed, and they became afraid to try. Since they’re unwilling to try, they have to make trying the failure and failing the success.
“Students mock anyone who answers a question, who carries their books home at night, who asks a question. The lesson is that if you want to fit in, you better not learn.”
Sally tries to break down these attitudes every day. “I say, if your friends tell you up is down and down is up, are you going to listen? You have a chance in this life to do something, but not if you spend your time listening to someone who wants you to do the opposite of the right thing.”
Sally attacks the fear as the first step toward building self-confidence. “You have to think about the things you can do instead of the things you can’t do—and you’ll be amazed at how many things you can do.”
Researchers find that an optimistic personal outlook is more than just seeing the bright side of things. Believing in yourself actually produces increases in good health, motivation, and achievement for six in ten people.
Schulman 1999