I love it when my daughter reads my posts and comes to me with ideas of what to write about next.  Earlier this week, she encouraged me to write about, “Not worrying about what people think about you.  It only matters what you think about yourself.  People can not force you to think differently about yourself.”  I find it amazing how an eight year old can capture the intent of some of the sections in the manuscript I’m working on with a few words.

The business of you starts when we recognize who we are and what we want to do with the time and resources we have in life.  Saying “start” is misleading.  The business of you is a continuous realization of who we are as we experience our lives.  Thinking of ourselves as a business simply gives us tools we can use to approach daily decision-making in a manner adding value to our lives, those around us and the environment we live in.  It can help us change the world we interact and interdependent with.

To get the most out of our interactions with our world, not worrying about what people think about us is important.  If we do worry about what others think, we change our decisions and actions to accommodate the model within our heads of whoever we are trying to please.  The thing is, our model of what others are thinking is more often than not grossly inaccurate or just plain wrong.  There is now way to know the inner thoughts of another person, no matter how close we are to them.  Realizing others don’t think as we do and we are unable to think for others sets ourselves free to be and do as we please.  We enable ourselves to be the executive officer of our business.

I couldn’t agree more with my daughter in that “People can not force you to think differently about yourself.”  When we worry about what other people think, we allow others to direct our activities as discussed above.  When we manage the business of ourselves, we disassociate our mental weather patterns from others and take responsibility for our own thoughts, our bodies and spirit.  Seeing ourselves as a business strengthens our connections with others and our environment as it comes with a realization of our interdependence with others.  We create the system of humanity together, but it starts with knowing and managing the business of you.