I Heart Me (11 page)

When I talk about wiring brain networks, sometimes someone comments that surely a person can just have a moment of insight and
know
they are
enough
, just as a person can have a moment of insight that leaves them enlightened.

That's absolutely true! And with that insight come changes in brain chemistry that support the new mindset. Over time, with consistent thinking and feeling in this new way, brain networks build up and wire in that knowledge, and once the brain
networks are there, there's very little chance you'll
ever
go back to the
not
enough stage of self-love. Ultimately, it only does take one thought.

If that insight hasn't struck you yet, though, don't despair – keep wiring in ‘I
am
enough' and you'll make it stick! Repetition! Repetition! Repetition!

Chapter 5

Does It Matter If People Like You?

‘I'm a rose whether I'm admired or not. I'm a rose whether anyone's crazy about me or not.'

S
ERDAR
Ö
ZKAN

I spoke at a conference in Las Vegas in 2007, shortly after my first book was published. It felt like my big break and I wanted it to go well. At one point during a story that I was telling, a man in the front row was laughing so hard he fell right off his chair and landed in the aisle, still in hysterics. I saw him and immediately felt on a high.

A split second later, a man on the far left of me also caught my attention. While it seemed that everyone in the auditorium was laughing, he had a bored, stern look on his face. My own face flushed. I lost concentration. If it wasn't for the fact that when people are laughing you can say almost anything and get away with it, I would have crash-landed right there. There were only 10 minutes of my talk left, so even though I stumbled through it, I don't think anyone else noticed.

Later that evening, as we sat having drinks, my partner, Elizabeth, told me how proud she was of me and how people were stopping her and telling her what a great talk I'd given. You'd think I'd be on a high, wouldn't you? I certainly had moments of internal celebration, but my mind kept returning to the man on my left who hadn't been smiling. My face flushed each time I thought of him. I wondered if I'd offended him. I ran through bits of my presentation in my mind, looking for anything that could offend, but I found none. I wondered if he was a university professor or a sceptic who had taken offence to the fact that I bridge mainstream science with self-help, alternative medicine and spirituality. I hoped I wouldn't run into him in case he was aggressive. You know how I was around aggressive people!

As you may gather, this was a time in my life when I was overly concerned with whether people liked me or not. I suspect you've behaved in much the same way in your own life. We are, after all, only human.

It's been said that you shouldn't be concerned with whether people like you or not, only with whether
you
like yourself or not.

I like those words and I suspect you do too. There's something comforting in them, something that feels true. Perhaps it's the sense of light at the end of the tunnel.

I think this is why we all like quotes so much. They remind us of wisdom we know but usually forget in our day-to-day life. Words like these give us hope and remind us of who we want to be and how we want to be.

To be unconcerned with what people think of you is a worthy goal to have. But it's also OK to cut yourself some slack and not get annoyed at yourself when you
are
concerned.

It's normal to want people to like you. So long as you're not obsessed with it, it's quite healthy, because it means you'll be aware of your own behaviour. How would the world be if we all just kept on being ourselves with no regard whatsoever for the impact of our behaviour on others?

The key is to have a healthy awareness of how others may perceive us, but not to adopt their opinions as our own unless we can honestly see some truth in them. Some of us get the idea that to be happy, or enlightened, we need to be 100 per cent unconcerned about what people think of us. But living with absolutes like this is only setting ourselves up for not being enough: if we're not 100 per cent free of people's opinions of us, we've failed, or if we don't feel
enough
100 per cent of the time, we've failed.

But life is not black or white, nor is it something in between. Life kind of floats from black to white and white to black, dances a little on the grey, splurges in yellows and oranges, meditates on the blue, goes wild on the red and is pretty much, for the most part, quite unpredictable. If we can live with that, then great.

If we can live with a concern for what people think of us but not be too bothered when they don't like us, then that's great, too.

I remember the moment I had that insight into my own progress, after working on wiring ‘I
am
enough' into my brain for a few months. I was running one of my online courses and after one of
my live webinars I received an e-mail from a woman asking for her money back. I don't think she expected me to be answering my own e-mails, because her language was quite clipped as she communicated that she found listening to me really annoying.

It really didn't bother me. My face didn't flush. Instant biofeedback! It showed me that the change I was making was embedded into my brain and nervous system. In the past, on the odd occasion when I'd received some negative feedback, the first thing that happened was that my face flushed and felt hot. This time I didn't need to use any positive self-talk. I didn't need to get angry. I just decided that you can't please everyone and it was a waste of time trying. I just let it go.

I'm telling you about my own transformation here because you'll be able to relate to it yourself. Given you're reading this book, I suspect that, deep down, we're very much the same.

When someone says they don't care what people think of them, most of the time:

1. They're lying.
   
2. They think they're not very well liked, so their words are more of a coping strategy.
   
3. They lack confidence around people.
   
4. What they're saying is an affirmation to help them to get to that place.
   

There's a reason why we want people to like us. We're genetically wired that way. Our biology needs connection.

We learned long ago that safety came in numbers and that if we helped each other out it was better for all of us. Being rejected meant starvation or death. Even though it doesn't mean that today (except in parts of the world where hunger is a reality), it is still embedded deep in the human psyche. It still brings up the fear at a biological and neurological level. We might not understand the basis for our need to be liked, but we do have that need. It's innate.

So there's absolutely nothing wrong with you if you feel concerned about what people think of you.
Being rejected is the number one human fear. Being accepted is the number one desire
.

Let me share with you a little of how it was that needing to connect and to be accepted came to be innate. The way evolution works is really very simple. It occurs when a gene mutates into two or more versions. It's a bit like two people viewing the same landscape and painting it. Each version, while clearly showing the same landscape, will be slightly different. One person might use lighter shades of colour than the other, for instance.

Let's say a pink gene mutated into a light shade of pink and a darker shade of pink. Now say the gene was a social interaction gene and that the light pink version was one that made a person want to interact with others and the dark pink version was one that made a person not like interaction.

Evolution needs sex to take place. It requires genes to pass from one generation to the next. The person with the lighter pink shade of gene would be more likely to reproduce and pass that gene on to the next generation than the person with the darker shade, because they would be more likely to be out meeting people and forming relationships.

If the light pink gene were four times more likely to be passed on than the dark pink one, what we would find would be that after lots and lots and lots of generations had passed, the light pink gene would be in pretty much every person's genome. Winding the clock forward a half million or so years, not only would the gene now be in every person, but it would also have infiltrated many biological systems, such would be its necessity in the human genome. This is essentially what has happened.

This is why connecting is so healthy and so absolutely necessary for human life. Social connection even acts as a longevity support. Studies of people in their eighties and even over the age of 100 have all found the same thing: that connection is healthy and makes us live longer.

Connecting with one another even helps our mental health. While examining a large social network of over 12,000 people, Nicholas Christakis, formerly a Harvard professor and currently at the Yale Institute of Network Science, and his colleague, James Fowler, from UCLA, found that for every point increase in connectedness, there was a significant increase in happiness.
¹

So, one of the best antidotes to depression is actually to get out and interact with people. It may be hard to do, but
it feeds your biology. Sitting at home, isolating yourself, only makes it worse.

In particular, when people enjoy connections, they have healthier hearts. Connection produces the hormone oxytocin, which is a cardioprotective hormone. Basically, that means it protects the heart and cardiovascular system. It lowers blood pressure and also sweeps the arteries clear of some of the precursors to cardiovascular disease. It's a hormone that's essential for human life. The oxytocin gene really is the pink gene I spoke of above. It's so important to evolution that it's estimated to be around 500 million years old. Even dinosaurs needed to connect!

I discussed many of the effects of oxytocin in my book
Why Kindness is Good for You
. Rather than repeat it all here, I recommend you take a look at that book if the subject interests you.

So, deep down, as deep as it goes in fact, we need each other and we want to be accepted and liked by each other. Being accepted and liked goes right to the roots of survival. If we're not accepted or liked, we can't pass our genes on and, essentially, that feels like the end. It's why being rejected is the number one human fear. In the collective human psyche, it's a threat to our very survival.

The fear of not being accepted is so strong it causes both women and men to try to change their appearance to try to be more of what they think the other will prefer.

Deep down, everyone feels that if they look a certain way, they're more likely to be liked, and therefore accepted. Many adjust their behaviour, including how they speak, so that they'll be accepted.