Sometimes our mood and actions depend on some subjective appraisal of some particular people: approval of colleagues and bosses, the decision whether we should be hired, some contests or competitions.
It's all nice and very important but all these things should be used purely for something useful: maybe as a source of energy or maybe as an opportunity to train.
What's important about it is not to take it all to heart and not let external considerations ruin your self-esteem or take your energy away.
The thing is that any subjective appraisal of you as a person or a personality, may concern only twenty per cent of real you, but all the rest concerns purely those people who appraise you and their personal life experience.
For instance, some boss would choose his executive not only according to a person's abilities but also according to one's tendency to be ruled. An executive should definitely be weaker or duller than the boss so that the boss would not be replaced by the executive some day. Usually it's not the best professionals but the most servile and least competitive people who get the promotion.
They test you at the interview and you seem to be doing just well but still they don't hire you? There are many reasons for it. They might have asked you to come in order to give a good showing to some candidate who has been chosen and supported by influential people long ago. Or they might have used you to get some interesting information about your former employers. Or even a better situation- if they asked you to come only because their HR manager needed to meet the plan of interviewing ten candidates just for the sake of appearance, even if the right candidate had already been found.
Contests and competitions are usually held for particular people who are supposed to win. They choose the participants and don't want them to be very strong. And if someone turns out to be better (it may be you), it's not the reason to make you a winner. An appraisal is a subjective thing and it's influenced by some preliminary agreements or, for instance, by the fact that some nice respectable person hasn't won for several years and it would be really awful not to let this person win right now… And that's why they may choose this person a winner...
And even if the contest was honest, then honesty is very relative thing too. As some person could have had the opportunity to prepare for it for months or years, even with the help of trainers and consultants. While you, being impoverished, would have to work at McDonald's round the clock and train only at night for an hour while being awfully tired and then crawl to the bed (it's an exaggerated example but a true one too). Or, for instance, it's not the best Formula-1 racing driver who wins and generally it's not a matter of driving a racing car skillfully but rather a matter of how much money you may bring to the team to buy, for instance, best motors.
People's approval and praise is generally «talk of the town». People may both approve and disapprove of something for many reasons: if one is a buddy or a friend - they approve of one's actions, if one praised them once, they praise back, etc. We praise friends, relatives, people important for us... Oh yes, and if among those who compete there's not a single person we would surely praise, then we may praise someone unknown but fancied by us. But if someone fairly known turns out to be competing with others, then others will be criticized no matter how nice, great or better they may be. So, the unknown ones will be «treated as mud» and humiliated.
What all this text is about... When they praise and encourage you, you become happy and use it as a source of energy (or a source for something useful). But when they criticize you or choose others instead of you, don't take it close to heart as it has nothing to do with your personal traits and it shouldn't undermine your self-esteem. It's just a reason to think how to melt those criticizing people into collaboration and think about their real motives and aims.
Translate:
Muhortova Natalie
Art by Amateur (Datsenko)
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