Not everybody will talk nicely about you, you know. You will face some negative opinions about yourself, regardless of the amount of value you provide or how nice you behave to others. And that is a thing you must cope with, because sooner or later it will rush into your life. The sooner you have a successful and visible career the sooner you’ll have to face more and more powerful negations to your activity. In itself, this manifestation of resistance to what you do is not that big or important as people tend to make it. To some degree it is a very natural and almost necessary thing. But there is an inner feeling of security and comfort that is being challenged by every negative opinion, and that is creating in turn a flow of negative emotions. Let’s see how you can deal with that.
Accept Them
The first and the most difficult thing to do about that, is to accept the simple fact that they can exist. It’s difficult because you link success to popularity, and popularity means recognition from an increasing number of people. Every negative opinion will feel like a decrease in popularity and you’ll be incline to take it as a lack of success. In fact, negative opinions about you have nothing to do with your success, because you should have your own definition about being successful.
A negative opinion is no better than a positive one in terms of popularity either, because it will still be about you. It will still make you popular, only in a negative way. They say “there is no such thing as bad advertising” for a reason, you know. Because there is no bad advertising, there is only advertising. So every time somebody is talking badly about you, remember that they’re still taking about you.
Acceptance of negative opinions is also a good exercise of sympathy. People have the right to have and stand for different opinions, other than yours. It’s a fundamental right and you should be happy every time somebody is exercising that right. It’s a good thing even if it comes up with something negative about yourself.