When someone tries to hurt you, think about Eleanor Roosevelt’s words that nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent. This essay unpacks the meaning of this quote.
Introduction
The famous line, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent,” is credited to one of the first ladies, Eleanor Roosevelt. The line speaks a lot about self-esteem and dignity. If we think deeply, this particular quote seems to be very true and powerful.
It is up to us to maintain our dignity and self-respect. We have to believe in ourselves. No matter what people say, we should be what we are. Simply by someone’s statement, we cannot seize to be what we ought to be. Unless you have the feeling or sense of inferiority, no one can make you inferior. In other words, you have to control your feelings and emotions because you are responsible for them.
Why Nobody Can Make You Feel Inferior without Your Consent
You should always feel good about yourself and be proud of who you are. In this world of different ethnicities, we ought to face situations where people will try to put us down by passing comments. But we should always be positive and control our responses. We should never retaliate to such spurious comments. We will feel inferior only if we agree to the comments related to inferiority. So disregard such comments.
If you are positive in life, any negative comments will never bother you, and it will be easy for you to pay no heed to them. We should never allow someone else’s comments to influence our mindset. A mosquito trying to bite us is a good example of our denial to allow anyone to harm us.
If we are aware of the mosquito, we will never allow it to bite us. Then why do we allow such spurious comments to bother us? Don’t even let them sit on you. Abuses hit at the center of an individual’s emotional state. We feel disgraced because somewhere in our hearts and minds, we are afraid that whatever is being said might be true to some extent.
Being influenced by someone else’s comments is a bad habit. Just like other bad habits, this one can also be got rid of. One simply needs some practice and a little bit of meticulousness. We should always try to suppress the urge to allow such spurious comments to enter into our minds. Once this is done, our minds will be peaceful.
Suppose in a grocery store, the costly products are marked with low prices, and the cheaper products are marked with higher prices – what would be our reaction? We would say, “This is not correct.”
Conclusion
The message here is that the higher esteem we keep of ourselves, lesser will be the chances that other’s comments or opinions will have any significance. It’s true that we want substantiation and recognition, but if we want to succeed in life, we should believe our substantiation and recognition that appears from within.
We should be as sure about us as the rising of the sun. The key to our happiness and sustenance is our belief in ourselves and who we are – though it’s not easy when we are disregarded. But as mentioned above, make it a habit to disregard spurious comments. Believe me; you’ll be the happiest person on earth. You should learn how to be happy in spite of being jerked (when you don’t get the love, care, and respect that you expect or deserve).