For most of my twenties, I cared deeply what other people thought.

I rehearsed conversations in my head. I worried about how messages would be read. I made decisions partly based on how they’d look from the outside. And like a lot of people who live this way, I told myself I was being thoughtful and considerate. In reality, I was just exhausted.

The shift, when it eventually came, didn’t feel like becoming colder or harder. It felt like reclaiming an enormous amount of attention I’d been quietly renting out to other people without their knowing.

“Not caring what others think” is a phrase that gets misused. It doesn’t mean becoming rude, callous, or indifferent to feedback. It means no longer letting imaginary versions of other people’s opinions run your inner life. After years of writing about this on Hack Spirit, and years of working on it through Buddhist practice, here are ten simple ways I’ve come back to again and again.

1. Notice how often you’re rehearsing

This is the first thing to catch. Most of us spend a surprising amount of our day rehearsing.

Rehearsing what we’ll say in a meeting. Rehearsing how we’ll explain a decision to a parent. Rehearsing arguments with people we haven’t even had arguments with yet. The rehearsal is always for an audience, and the audience is almost always someone whose approval we’re worried about losing.

The first step is just noticing how much of your mental real estate this takes up. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you can’t unsee it, you can start to interrupt it.

2. Remember the spotlight effect

Psychologists call it the spotlight effect. We chronically overestimate how much other people are paying attention to us.

You think everyone noticed that thing you said. They didn’t. You think your colleague is still thinking about the typo in the email. They aren’t. You think the people at the gym are watching you struggle with the weight. They’re watching themselves in the mirror.

Most people are far too preoccupied with their own performance to be deeply analyzing yours. Internalize this and a huge amount of self consciousness simply has nowhere to land.

3. Make your decisions in private first

One of the most powerful habits I’ve developed is making important decisions before telling anyone about them.

The moment you ask three friends what they think before deciding, you’ve handed your decision over to a committee. You’ll spend more time managing their reactions than you will making the actual choice. By the time you decide, you’ll be deciding for them, not for yourself.

Sit with a decision alone. Write it down. Let yourself feel into it. Then act on it, and explain it afterwards if explaining is needed. Decisions made this way feel cleaner. They also tend to be better.

4. Identify your inner council of three

Here’s a useful exercise. Write down the names of the two or three people whose opinion of you genuinely matters.

For most of us, the list is short. A partner. A close friend. A parent or sibling. Maybe a mentor. That’s it. These are the people who actually know you, who have your long term interests at heart, and whose feedback is worth taking seriously.

Everyone else, and I mean everyone, gets a polite nod and not much more. Their opinion can be received. It doesn’t have to be acted on. The mistake we make is treating the opinions of strangers, acquaintances, and distant relatives with the same weight as our inner council. They aren’t the same. Once you’ve named your real council, the rest of the noise becomes much easier to filter out.

5. Practice deliberate small embarrassments

The fear of judgment is a muscle that gets weaker with use, in the best possible way.

Do small things on purpose that make you slightly uncomfortable. Sing badly in front of someone. Speak up in a meeting when you’re not sure. Order in your shaky Vietnamese, or French, or Spanish. Ask the awkward question. Wear something a little outside your usual style.

Each small embarrassment teaches your nervous system the same lesson. The sky didn’t fall. People didn’t reject you. You survived. And the next embarrassment becomes a little less heavy. This is how you build genuine confidence, not by avoiding discomfort, but by making peace with it in small repeatable doses.

6. Stop explaining yourself

This one took me a long time to learn.

When you make a decision someone doesn’t like, the instinct is to over explain. To justify. To produce a long argument designed to make the other person agree with you. This rarely works. And it almost always weakens your position.

“No, thank you” is a complete sentence. “I’ve decided not to come” doesn’t need a paragraph. “I’m going in a different direction” can stand alone. The more you justify, the more you signal that you yourself aren’t sure. Confident people give short reasons or no reasons at all. They don’t perform their decisions for the approval of others.

7. Catch the thought as a thought

“They’ll think I’m pretentious.”

“She’ll judge me for that.”

“Everyone will assume the worst.”

These are thoughts. They feel like facts, but they’re thoughts. They arise in your mind, often automatically, often without basis.

The Buddhist framing is helpful here. A thought isn’t an instruction. You don’t have to act on it just because it appeared. Notice the thought, label it (“ah, that’s a worry about being judged”), and let it pass. You don’t need to argue with it. You just need to stop treating every anxious projection as a memo from reality.

8. Get comfortable being misunderstood

You cannot control how you’re perceived. You can only control how you behave.

Some people will misread your intentions no matter what you do. Some will project things onto you that have nothing to do with you. Some will quietly decide you’re something you’re not, and there’s nothing you can say that will change their mind.

Once you accept this fully, an enormous amount of energy gets freed up. You stop trying to manage every interpretation. You stop chasing every miscommunication. You stop preemptively explaining yourself to people who weren’t going to understand anyway. Some misunderstanding is the cost of being a person in the world. Pay it and move on.

9. Audit who you’re performing for

Every so often, take a quiet moment and ask yourself this question. Whose voice am I hearing right now?

When you make a career choice, whose approval are you actually chasing? When you post something online, who are you imagining will see it? When you buy that thing, whose admiration are you hoping to attract?

Most of the time, when you identify the actual audience, it shrinks. It turns out you’ve been performing for a parent who’s no longer in your life, an ex who’s long gone, a high school version of yourself who needed to feel respected. Naming the audience often disarms it. You realize you’ve been organizing your life for a ghost.

10. Build a daily practice that returns you to yourself

The final piece is the most important.

It’s very hard to stop caring about others’ opinions if you don’t have a stable internal reference point of your own. If you have no relationship with yourself, the opinions of others rush in to fill the gap.

This is why daily practices matter. Meditation. Journaling. A morning run. A few quiet minutes with coffee before you check your phone. Something that returns you to your own ground before the world starts pulling at you. For me, it’s a daily Buddhist meditation practice and a regular run along the Saigon River. The specifics matter less than the habit. The point is to spend at least a few minutes each day in your own company, on your own terms.

Once you have that anchor, other people’s opinions become information rather than instructions.

Final thoughts

Not caring what others think isn’t about becoming armored. It’s about no longer outsourcing your sense of self.

The people I admire most aren’t the ones who don’t care about anyone. They’re the ones who care deeply about the right people, and have made peace with the rest. They’ve stopped performing for ghosts. They’ve stopped explaining themselves to strangers. They’ve built a quiet inner authority that doesn’t need constant external confirmation.

You don’t have to stop caring about people. You just have to stop letting their imagined opinions live rent free in your head.