#161: Not being liked
I like being liked.
Not being liked scares me. I don’t like the thought of someone not liking me.
Worse, what if someone were to hate me?
I find the thought of not being liked by someone affronting, I feel exposed, worried, anxious as if something bad is going to happen to me.
I haven’t had that many experiences not being liked, not that I know of anyway.
I’ve always felt that I’ve got on well with a lot of people. In fact, I’ve always made an effort to be liked by people.
I always try to get on someone’s level, to find something in common and to connect with people.
I see it as a strength, I hope to be approachable and relatable and able to talk with anyone.
I can have conversations with people from all walks of life. I’ve got very varied interests from sports to science fiction books. From mental health to cryptocurrency.
Yet there are people that don’t like me, I think anyway, and as I’ve grown into more of a leadership position I’ve been part of making decisions and statements that aren’t well received by everyone.
I feel uncomfortable even writing about being liked now, I already feel as if I’m opening up the chance to not be liked or be criticised right now.
Yet, this desire of mine, this need of mine to be liked is something that I’ve noticed recently and I want to write about it and explore it further.
I want to be liked by everyone. I want everyone to like me.
What a funny sentence to write, yet it’s true.
In my dream world, everyone would like me and I’d like everyone, I’d be friends with everyone. Everyone I work with or meet or interact with would have a positive experience with me, we’d be mates, we’d be friends. I’d like them and they’d like me. We’d bump into each other in the street and it’d be all smiles and “Hey!” and hugs and there would be warmth and laughter. It’d be like that with everyone. Happy. Happy. Happy.
When I began sharing more on LinkedIn a couple of years ago, I had experiences of people not liking me and trolling me.
I got called everything from a “wet lettuce” to someone building a mental health business purely for my own ego and to make money. I got long messages from people saying I’m not in mental health for the "right reasons" and that I’m “preying on vulnerable people”
I was wounded by those comments. They knocked me and it took me a while to build the confidence to start sharing again. It’s one of the reasons I battled so much with writing my Book as I still have a fear that I’ll be trolled in a vicious way and I am not good enough to write about mental health.
I know there’s a difference between someone disagreeing with me and challenging me and not liking me. Disagreement and challenge is fine and is healthy and if anything I think that happens when there’s a mutual respect. I really like that. When people in my life call me out, it’s often out of love and I like that a lot, it means a lot to me.
I find not being liked hard though, because I find it difficult to feel that I am not liked for something inherently about me, my character or my qualities.
The fear of not being liked has held me back massively as a Leader.
In fact, I’d say it made being a Leader and specifically a CEO almost impossible for me.
I was paralysed by decisions that might hurt people or that I knew people might find difficult to take. The fear of not being liked, or people being angry with me was enough to stop me making decisions or it made making decisions (especially around people) excruciatingly painful.
The fear of not being liked on some deeper level is something about being left or abandoned, about people leaving me and that taps into a place that is scary for me, which is where I feel alone.
The fear of not being liked is the fear of being alone and/or the fear of being abandoned (on a more unconscious level).
The fear of being alone is different to being on my own. I love being on my own sometimes, yet feeling lonely is different and that feeling of isolation is a place I find dark and frightening.
I recently wrote in my Journal that I can’t be liked by everyone and I can’t like everyone.
It was quite a liberating sentence for me to write as I not only exhaust a lot of energy trying to be liked by everyone, but also making an effort to like everyone too, endlessly searching for the good in someone is quite tiring. I think working in mental health I feel that I have to be this compassionate superhero who sees the inherent positive good in everyone all the time, it’s very tiring to do that.
I notice that I feel more comfortable not being liked now or at the prospect of not being liked by someone. I don’t love it, but it’s OK.
I feel more secure from within, that if someone doesn’t like me or disagrees with me as an individual that it doesn’t shock me to the core as it may have done in the past.
That feels like a good place to be and I feel as if I can stand on two feet a bit more securely.
Being liked by others doesn’t define me.
I write this, because it’s becoming a bit of a revelation for me. I’m not developing to a point of “I don’t care what people think of me” - not at all. Yet I am developing to the point of being conscious of my desire to be liked by the people I meet, I work with or connect with in someway.
I write this in hope and in expectation that this will resonate as I know a lot of us like being liked.
Of course, I hope you like this too.
Cheers,
James x
What I'm up to:
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