Summary
- Kind of tiring to have all the focus on you ALL of the time? Doesn’t matter if it’s you being too smart, too pretty or too ugly. It’s anything that makes you standout and making everyone focused on you. THAT is tiring. Wouldn’t it be nice to relax when you go outside without having to worry about how other people think about you?
- Attention magnifies your fear of people.
- We can’t be ourselves under constant attention. - Doesn’t matter the setting, when we have dozen pairs of eyes aiming at us, it just feels weird. There is a reason why public speaking is one of the top fears for people. The thing is it’s not just glances. It’s the judgments & intent behind those glances. What are they thinking? Is something wrong with us? Maybe they are having WEIRD thoughts that we don’t even want to know about. Why are they staring at us? All these thoughts just go through our minds, and we go through our days worrying about it instead of enjoying the day. Other times, we just get tired of people wanting something from us. Too much attention is like putting ourselves under a microscope. we can see EVERYTHING.
- Expectations has the power to change one’s path.
- Attention feels like we are constantly being judged on that one trait. - If we are known for our smarts, people will expect us to be smart. People will judge us when we are not smart. Smart becomes their expectation of us. It can make us feel anxious and restless, because we are not liked if we are not smart. You can also replace smarts with beauty, money, fame. When people expect these things, they have the power to change the way we act. Why?…because we are people, we like attention. Unless we deliberately break those expectations and replace them with our expectations of ourselves, we’ll feel stressed.
- We are pressured to become someone else by pretty much everyone and everything. - The world will always try to force you to become one way. You should drive this car, buy this brand, sing this song, eat this food, because it’s a capitalist society. People make money off of you buying their things, which is ok until they start pressuring us to be a certain way. The most apparent is physical beauty. Somehow all the guys are super ripped and all the girls are extremely skinny. That is the standard of beauty, but normal people aren’t like that. We don’t have photoshopped bodies or plastic surgeries, so we can look almost unrealistic. We’re just people. We need to repeatedly remind ourselves that we don’t need to follow their expectation of what is beautiful, smart, or successful. Be you. Just you.
- Walk in your own spotlight, not the ones others made for you.
- Michael Jordon is without a doubt one of the greatest basketball in history. Adele has one of the most powerful voice in the current music industry. Ibtihaj Muhammad is one of the best female fencers in the world and became the first American Olympian to wear the hijab [a veil traditionally worn by Muslim women]. They all have countless critics, but they still walked their own path upon discovering their unique talents. We have to find our own style and create our own spotlight, not the ones others set for us.