I am fortunate to have been raised in a family that was very relaxed. My family didn’t have strict expectations and wasn’t too hung up on what I needed to do for a future career or how great my grades were. My family did care about how well I did in school but not to the high degree that some other families do. However, my mother was very direct with her comments. She had no issue telling me her feelings about what she perceived as flaws. My mother is brutally honest which is wonderful at times and sometimes can cause a headache.
A comment that stuck with me for years was her belief that I was not independent. Growing up I wasn’t adventurous at all. I often was more interested in staying home and playing video games during the weekend than going out and socializing with friends. My older brothers would go out to parties with friends while I’d just want to stay home and read a book, watch a movie or play a game. I also didn’t work at all during high school. My brothers had obtained jobs as soon as they could, but I had no interest in working. I had anxiety about working and felt like I wasn’t qualified to get a job. I didn’t have my driver’s license either. Unfortunately, my first and only car accident to date had occurred while on my learner permit. My mother felt like that experience was enough to show that I was not ready to be on the road again.
When applying for college, all the universities I applied to were located in New York which was 3000 miles away from my hometown. My mother discouraged me from going, believing that I was not independent enough to handle the transition. She’d loudly tell other people that she believed that after the first semester, I’d come back home again and how I wouldn’t be able to handle the snow, making new friends or being independent.
Well thankfully my family was wrong about my independence. Once I left, I didn’t come back to California. I also got my first job during my first semester of college and saved up enough money (without any assistance from my family) to travel abroad. Eventually I was able to save up for my first car and learned to successfully drive. Now my mom recognizes how independent I truly am. However, I had invested too much time feeling resentment towards my family and trying to prove them wrong. My family was wrong about me at the time but I’ve also been wrong about them and about many other things in my life too.
Proving myself towards my family only kept me living in the past and held me back from truly connecting with my family. I mistakenly believed that I had accomplished so much because I was trying to prove my family wrong. Truthfully, I accomplished so much because I have the power to shape my own life and everything I need is already within me. I allowed myself to feel unnecessarily negative towards myself and others by holding onto what was said and done in the past. Letting that go and accepting that everyone, including my family, is capable of making misjudgments has allowed me to live my life for myself instead of trying to seek validation from others. I’ve also been spending more energy connecting with my family and appreciating them for who they are. Life is too fleeting to focus on all the things that were said years ago.
Below are some lessons I’ve learned about how to stop trying to prove yourself to the world.
1. You are capable of making the change in your life. Giving other people power over how you feel about your own capabilities will only interfere with what you can achieve. You can achieve anything you want to, but you have to be willing to invest energy, time and commitment to get what you want. One summer during undergrad I met a young man who was pursuing a graduate degree in mathematics. I told him immediately upon learning about his degree that I was bad at math. He replied that he was also bad at math. I was doubtful but he said how he always had bad grades at math, took longer to learn math and struggled for years. He told me that he got better at math with practice, tutoring and receiving extra support to get him at a level where he could study mathematics at a graduate level. His story was an inspiration for me. I realized that I am capable of making positive changes if I’m willing to invest the effort and time.
You are also capable of making any changes you want in your own life. If something doesn’t come natural to you, but you feel passionate then continue learning and growing. You are in control of what you can do despite any type of limitations or barriers you believe you have. Stay true to what you want you want in your life and continue to be accountable for your own success.
2. The search for acceptance starts and ends with you. Nobody else knows what is best for you, except you. You hold the keys to knowing how to live an authentic life. No one else in the world has walked through your shoes, knows your motivations, what inspires you and what you ultimately want. Trying to make people understand your choices is futile. Although some people may understand and encourage you, not everyone will. Stay true to your own choices and understand that you have the strength to keep yourself moving forward, to stay strong and to continue growing even when you make mistakes. As you develop better self-acceptance you will start to see your confidence build and you will find that you are not too bothered by the opinions of other people.
3. Material things don’t matter. Society is not concerned with your happiness. The people who think they are better than you are certainly not genuinely concerned for your happiness. You will encounter people who have different priorities to you. Some people want a big house, fancy car, eat at the best restaurants and want to go on luxurious holidays just because that is the message of success fed to them from other people. Some people may be chasing money so badly that they aren’t even sure why they want to be rich so badly. What makes you feel alive and happy? What motivates you and gets you excited? Your journey may involve accomplishing things that don’t matter all that much to other people in your life. However, these accomplishments are the things that truly make you happy and give your life meaning and worth. Focus on building yourself as a person and staying true to who you are. As you develop a stronger character, stand true to your values and continue pursuing the ideas and activities you love, you’ll find that your life feels happier and meaningful.
4. You can’t please everyone. It is impossible to please everyone. Every person in the world, no matter how kind and amazing, has someone out there who has endless criticisms and hesitates to give compliments. If anything the people who constantly criticize you and can’t recognize your accomplishments are the people you should definitely not be concerned about pleasing. Focus on the people who support and love you. You don’t need to try to please the people in your support group, but recognizing who your supporters are will make you less concerned about the people who are happy to see you fail.
5. You stay negative and unappreciative towards the people in your life. One of the worst things that occurred from trying to prove myself to other people, is that I continued to hold resentment and negativity towards my family. I actually stopped myself from bonding with my family until I achieved this unrealistic state of feeling like I had proven myself to them. Now I do appreciate and value my family. I also actively make an effort to be part of my family’s life but that started once I threw away the belief that I had something to prove to them. Seeking validation from others ends up harming your relationships. You will always be looking for recognition from other people rather than just enjoying someone’s company and fully appreciating them as a person. Seeking validation may also unearth negativity that never existed in the first place. You might imagine that people are jealous of you and are out to get you. Everyone will be viewed as competition that you have to beat. Any type of criticism will unnecessarily change your perspective of someone.
6. The right people will love you for who you are. The people worth impressing just want you to be yourself. These are the people who support your decisions and encourage you to be a better person without asking you to change who you are. As a result the only person you should be focusing on impressing is yourself. Don’t change so that other people will like you. The right people will like you for who you are anyway. Trying to be someone else just to make people like you is just a waste of time. Live your life authentically and embrace and nourish the relationships with people who love the authentic you.
7. It is impossible not to fail. Failure can make us believe that we look foolish and make us inaccurately believe that other people think we are weak. Failure will inevitably happen to you and happens even to the people you look up to. I guarantee that your role models in life have failed at one point or another. Failure is actually one of the ways you can live an authentic life and you are more likely to succeed from failing. When you strive hard to not embarrass yourself, not take risks and minimize the chances of failure, you will be living a life based around how you look. You’ll pass up opportunities to challenge yourself and grow because of this fear of failing. As a result, your life will not be moving in the direction you want it to and you will not feel like you are truly living.
8. Don’t rush through life. For several years, I was rushing through life. I felt like there was this invisible clock that had this average time of how long things took that I simply had to beat. I felt like doing things faster was proving something to someone. I graduated college a semester early and with two degrees as well. At the time, this decision to rush through undergrad felt like the best choice I could make at the time. I felt that graduating early and with a double major showed other people that I was intelligent and ambitious. Rushing through college cheated me of some amazing experiences. I felt like I rarely made time to socialize, prioritize my friendships and there were extracurricular activities that I could have been involved in. My health was also thrown to the wayside and resulted in insomnia, obesity and contributed to depression. Truthfully rushing through college didn’t really benefit me significantly. I’m in a similar place of my life career-wise as my friends who received their degrees around the same time or even later. Also, nobody really cares that I graduated early. Back then I felt like graduating early was so cool but now I barely mention it and I even forget that it happened at times.
There is no real reason to rush through life. Enjoy the journey and get the full benefits from the experience. Rushing to get your business up and running or to graduate may seem like a great idea at the time but you are cheating yourself of opportunities that will help you in the long run. Not rushing also saves you from investing too much energy into things that don’t matter. By rushing you become so focused on achieving a goal that you may not even consider if achieving this goal is actually what you want for yourself.
9. You are enough. You don’t need to prove yourself by trying to publish a book, with a promotion, wealth or any type of public acknowledgement that you are a success. There is nothing to prove to anyone. Work on impressing yourself and staying authentic to who you are. Nourish the people who do support you and love the real you. Stop looking for validation from anyone else except you. Don’t spend the rest of your life trying to prove to the world that you are worthy. A failure isn’t a sign of worthlessness, but an inevitably that leads to growth and success. Love the people in your life and don’t view them as competition or people you need to judge. Accept yourself and focus on your own actions since that is what truly matters for you to live your life.