“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
This is a hard one. But Eleanor Roosevelt knew what she was talking about. The former First Lady ranked in the top nine most widely admired people of the twentieth century. Her legacy, one among many, was to tell us “The choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” Yet her life was far from an easy one. Her experiences led her also to tell us this: “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ ”
How Others Can Make Us Feel
Perhaps the most frequent, and psychologically damaging, event we can experience is to have other people try to make us feel inferior to them. Parents, teachers, friends, and our peers have enormous influence on our state of happiness — if we let them. We can feel good about ourselves and the careless disparaging or mocking words of someone else can change our state immediately for the worse — if we let them. We can feel genuine and deserved excitement at our achievements and yet the words of critics can sink our enthusiasm — if we let them.
