Do you lose sleep thinking about other people’s opinions of you? How can you let go of this worry and start living your life?
The First Rule of Mastery examines the high price you pay for worrying about what others think, including missed opportunities, anxiety, and depression. Michael Gervais and Kevin Lake present a comprehensive framework for escaping the prison of other people’s opinions.
Read more in our overview of The First Rule of Mastery.
Overview of The First Rule of Mastery
In The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying About What People Think of You (2023), Michael Gervais and Kevin Lake tackle one of the most pervasive psychological barriers to personal fulfillment: excessive worry about others’ opinions. This challenge prevents people from living authentically, pursuing their dreams, and achieving their potential. Through a combination of psychological research and practical wisdom, the authors reveal how this preoccupation with other people’s judgments leads to missed opportunities, mental health issues, and profound regrets later in life. They also explore how modern culture and social media have intensified these challenges.
Michael Gervais is a psychologist who has worked with professional athletes, musicians, and CEOs to help them reach their peak performance. Kevin Lake serves as the Chief Creative Officer of the media company and consulting agency Finding Mastery, and has a background in producing documentaries. Their book provides a comprehensive framework for breaking free from the prison of other people’s opinions.
Part 1: Why You Worry About What Others Think
According to Gervais and Lake, most of us spend too much time worrying about what other people think of us. We may fear being judged by our friends, parents, bosses, or even total strangers, but where does this worry come from? In this section, we’ll explore the cognitive, personal, and cultural origins of our obsession with others’ opinions.
Cognitive Factors
Gervais and Lake explain that you’re neurologically hardwired to care about what other people think about you. This is because of evolution: Humans are fundamentally social creatures, and your ancestors’ survival depended on acceptance within their social group. As a result, you have a deep fear of rejection and an equally deep longing for belonging and acceptance. To help you meet these social needs, your brain is fine-tuned to identify potential threats to your social status and opportunities to gain acceptance. Whenever you’re in a social situation, your brain constantly scans your environment for signs of approval or rejection and then recalibrates your behavior to make you appear more likable.
Cognitive Biases
While you’re scanning your social environment for clues about your likability, cognitive biases can distort your thinking by exaggerating your likelihood of rejection and making you obsess about others’ opinions. The authors highlight three cognitive biases that may cloud your judgment.
1. The spotlight effect: You may mistakenly assume that you’re the center of everyone’s attention, just as you’re the center of your own attention. However, just like you, most people are busy focusing on themselves. This means that the time you spend worrying about what others think is often unnecessary, since they’re often not thinking about you at all.
2. False consensus: You may mistakenly assume that others share your perception of a situation, so if you view yourself negatively, you’re likely to overestimate the degree to which others view you negatively.
3. Confirmation bias: You may look for evidence that confirms your expectations about how others perceive you while ignoring evidence that disproves those expectations. For instance, if you believe that your manager thinks you’re incompetent, you may interpret a frown as evidence that they’re judging you harshly, when actually it’s a sign of concentration as they listen to what you have to say.
Personal Factors
While everyone has a neurological predisposition to worry about what others think, Gervais and Lake explain that you’re even more prone to worrying about others’ opinions if you’ve externalized your self-worth. In other words, your worries are worse if you believe that your value as a person depends on whether other people see you as valuable. This can take many forms: For example, you might determine your value based on whether others see you as intelligent or physically attractive. As a result, you spend a lot of time thinking about whether others see these positive traits in you, and any feedback suggesting that others don’t find you intelligent or attractive threatens your sense of personal value.
According to Gervais and Lake, one of the most destructive forms of externalized self-worth is an achievement-based identity, which you develop when you stake your value on being exceptional in your field. This is common among high-performing athletes, musicians, and artists. The authors explain that achievement-based identities often form in early life, when people who show talent at a young age receive praise for their abilities and internalize the idea that these abilities determine their worth. For example, if you showed promise at chess as a young child, you may have been so heavily praised that you developed the belief that your value depended on always being good at chess and winning tournaments.
Cultural and Social Factors
Gervais and Lake also argue that modern culture makes you even more susceptible to worrying about what other people think. They highlight two major facets of our culture that contribute to excessive worry: individualism and digital social lives.
Individualism
Gervais and Lake explain that modern culture is highly individualistic, emphasizing personal achievement and self-reliance over community. Although individualism sounds like a philosophy that encourages you to be less concerned about others, the authors explain that it actually has the opposite effect. They provide two reasons for this:
First, individualism holds that everyone is responsible for their own successes and failures. This mindset can make you believe that failing to achieve your goals in life means there’s something wrong with you, lowering your self-esteem. Furthermore, even when you do achieve your goals, the boost to your self-esteem may only be temporary, since you’re always at risk of failing next time. This turns life into a race to continually prove your worth. As you run this race, you never feel like you’re enough—so you turn to others for approval.
Second, individualism pulls your attention toward yourself and away from others, decreasing the quality of your relationships and deepening your sense of isolation. This isolation only increases your need for acceptance and fear of rejection, so you worry even more about what others think.
Digital Social Lives
Gervais and Lake also describe how our increasingly digital social lives are making the problem worse. They explain that social media makes you much more visible, which can leave you feeling exceptionally vulnerable to others’ judgments. Additionally, the more time you spend online, the less time you spend socializing in person, which leads to an increased sense of isolation. As we’ve stated, isolation further deepens your need for acceptance and your fear of rejection.
Part 2: The Costs of Worrying About What Others Think
If worrying about what others think evolved as a protective measure, then why is it a problem? Gervais and Lake explain that this behavior undermines your ability to live authentically and find fulfillment in your life. When you prioritize others’ views over your internal compass, you risk living according to other people’s values rather than your own.
The authors highlight three ways that worrying about what others think inhibits us:
1) Conforming In Social Situations
According to Gervais and Lake, worrying about others’ opinions leads you to conform in social situations. This could include staying silent when you have something to contribute, laughing at a joke you don’t find funny, or adopting an entire persona that’s different from how you’d normally behave.
Even if you conform to gain acceptance, this behavior only makes you feel more isolated and lonely because you aren’t seen as you really are. It also makes social interactions more stressful because you may feel pressured to constantly keep up your act. For example, suppose you consistently laugh at your coworker’s vulgar jokes even though they make you uncomfortable. While you might gain temporary acceptance, you may also experience growing inner conflict and stress from betraying your values.
Gervais and Lake say that ultimately, people who regularly conform in social situations have higher levels of anxiety and depression because of the cumulative toll that conformity takes on their mental health.
2) Addiction to Validation
Gervais and Lake explain that the tendency to seek approval and validation from others can become a debilitating addiction. Positive recognition feels good, which may lead you to try to experience it over and over again. This exacerbates your tendency to live for others’ opinions while neglecting your true goals and desires.
For example, if you receive a lot of attention for a social media post, you may develop a compulsion to spend increasing amounts of time on social media apps trying to recreate that validation. This addiction not only wastes valuable time but also increases your dependence on others, preventing you from making independent choices and developing genuine self-confidence.
3) Missed Opportunities and Regret
Gervais and Lake contend that fixating on others’ expectations can lead you to neglect your personal goals. They cite research on dying patients which shows that many people’s greatest regret at life’s end is that they lived according to others’ expectations rather than their own. Most people wish that they had shown more courage and lived authentically instead of putting their desires on hold out of a fear of what others might think.
Part 3: How to Stop Worrying About What Others Think
Fortunately, Gervais and Lake argue that you have the power to stop worrying so much about what others think of you. They outline two broad strategies for accomplishing this: shifting your perspective and shifting your responses.
Strategy 1: Shift Your Perspective
First, Gervais and Lake explain that you can start to worry less about what others think about you by changing your perspective—how you view and understand situations. They offer four key perspective shifts that will help you make this transition.
Method 1) Recognize Your Inherent Value
Gervais and Lake explain that you can worry less about what others think by developing a stronger internal sense of self-worth. This is a steadfast belief in your value as a person that doesn’t change as a result of failures or shortcomings. Recall that we worry more about what others think when we believe that our worth is determined by our positive qualities and achievements. By recognizing that your worth as a person isn’t threatened by failing to win others’ respect and approval, you can free yourself from the burden of feeling that your value is constantly under threat.
The authors argue that this perspective shift requires you to disentangle your self-worth from what you do. They claim that there is nothing you can do to become more or less worthy. So long as you continue to exist, that alone gives you value.
Method 2) Accept What’s Out of Your Control
Gervais and Lake advise you to draw a hard distinction between what’s within your control (your thoughts, feelings, and attitudes) and what’s out of your control (others’ thoughts and beliefs). They explain that worrying about things outside your control is pointless because there’s no way to translate that worry into productive action. For example, if you stay up all night worrying about the weather conditions before taking a trip, your worry will do nothing to improve the weather; you’ll only be tired because you stayed up all night. By recognizing that others’ perceptions of you are as beyond your control as the weather, you can relieve yourself from the pressure of constantly trying to manage their opinions.
Method 3) Counter Your Biases
Recall that you worry excessively about other people’s opinions because of your cognitive biases. You believe that others pay more attention to you than they do (the spotlight effect) and that they judge you as harshly as you judge yourself (false consensus). Furthermore, you actively look to confirm these beliefs (confirmation bias). The authors recommend two ways to broaden your perspective and counteract these biases.
First, to counter the spotlight effect, consider how much time you spend scrutinizing and thinking about others. It’s probably less time than you believe others spend thinking about you. Once you recognize how little time you spend thinking about others, you’ll realize that others are similarly spending very little time thinking about you. Then, you’ll understand you don’t need to worry so much about what others are thinking about you.
Second, to challenge your tendency to falsely assume that others hold a negative view of you, recognize that you never actually know what others are thinking. Studies have shown that even people who spend a lot of time together are terrible at predicting each other’s thoughts. Therefore, your belief that others think negatively about you is likely to be wrong.
Recognizing how little you know about what others think will also help you to overcome confirmation bias. Recall that you look for evidence confirming that others hold a negative belief about you because you already assume that they hold this belief. Once you recognize that you don’t know how they view you, you can become curious and try to find out what they actually think instead. Gervais and Lake recommend that you ask people about their perspective to learn about their point of view instead of trying to confirm your existing beliefs.
Method 4) Recognize Your Mortality
Lastly, Gervais and Lake recommend that you overcome your tendency to worry about what others think by contemplating your mortality. Recall that living for others’ expectations instead of following your dreams is one of the most common regrets of the dying. To avoid this, you must strip away superficial concerns like others’ opinions and focus your attention on what truly matters in your life. Contemplating your mortality helps clarify what really matters to you—you’d probably rather live an authentic, fulfilling life than conform to others’ expectations.
Strategy 2: Shift Your Responses
In addition to changing your attitude, Gervais and Lake encourage you to change your responses to social situations and feedback. Here, we’ll discuss three key changes you can make: recognizing your triggers, evaluating others’ opinions, and learning from your anxiety.
Method 1) Recognize Your Triggers and Practice New Responses
Gervais and Lake explain that you can start to worry less about what others think of you by changing your automatic responses to situations through deliberate practice. They outline three steps in this process:
1. Identify your triggers. Think through a situation that causes you anxiety. Then, mentally walk yourself through this situation, taking note of moments where you feel the most anxiety.
2. Develop new coping strategies. Consider your ideal reaction to these situations. For example, maybe you’d reassure yourself that you’ll be safe even if you fail or face criticism from others.
3. Practice your coping mechanisms. Put yourself into the situation you fear so that you can try out your ideal coping mechanisms. It will be frightening at first, but the more you practice, the more quickly you can make your new responses automatic. You can even do trial runs with less pressure first, like performing a wedding toast to an empty room.
For example, suppose you feel anxiety the night before a presentation at work. Instead of lying awake ruminating, you could reassure yourself with a mantra stating that you’re well-prepared and that there’s nothing more you need to think about. Then, you could practice this mantra even on nights when you don’t have a presentation. With repeated practice, you’d find that over time you automatically replace your tendency to ruminate with your new, healthier coping mechanism (that of reassuring yourself).
Method 2) Evaluate Others’ Opinions
Gervais and Lake recommend that you practice discernment when listening to feedback and criticism. If you take everything others say to heart, you may feel the need to meet an impossibly high number of conflicting expectations. However, if you simply ignore what others have to say, you might miss out on useful feedback and opportunities to grow. Therefore, the authors recommend taking a minute to reflect when you receive criticism or advice and coming to your own conclusions about whether it’s harmful or helpful. Additionally, Gervais and Lake recommend you figure out whose opinions you trust most and spend more time with them. This naturally increases your likelihood of hearing useful feedback.
Method 3) Learn From Your Anxiety
Finally, Gervais and Lake recommend that you approach experiences of social anxiety with curiosity and treat them as opportunities for personal development. Rather than avoiding situations that trigger your concern about others’ opinions, examine what your reactions reveal about your underlying beliefs and fears. Strong emotional reactions to other people’s opinions often reveal important information about yourself. For instance, if you’re hesitant to share ideas in meetings, explore whether you fear appearing incompetent or expressing disagreement with coworkers.
