Worried about others' perceptions of you?
Posted on August 28, 2025 by Alex Hristov, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
An article describing the reasons that cause us to be negatively self-conscious and what to do about it.
We all want to be liked. For the vast majority of humanity’s history, belonging to a community was critical for survival and therefore the need to be liked/accepted is literally written in our genes. A healthy dose of self-consciousness allows us to not be assholes and be accepted in various social circles.
Unfortunately, this can get out of control and become debilitating. The good thing is that it’s usually based on our own perceptions and the self-critic in our head rather than on reality.
We all live in our own heads and we’re the star of the show. We spend the vast majority of our time thinking about…ourselves. We may spend a little time thinking about others but mostly we just think about ourselves.
Everyone does this. They’re not parsing every word that we’ve spoken or everything we’ve done. They’re not pouring over data analyzing our successes and failures. Study after study finds that our judgement of others’ opinions of us is often flawed.
And even if someone thinks negatively about us…well, that’s just their opinion. Are they the ultimate judge of everything and everyone? Nope!
And consider this: if we’re a decent person, we try our best to do right by others and never do anything to consciously hurt others – anyone who chooses to judge us negatively is either uninformed or just someone who will never like us no matter what. And that’s fine. There’s always room for improvement but as long as our ethics are intact, there isn’t much to be concerned with.
