Your Loved Ones Love You Too

Your friends and family want the best for you, but sometimes their idea of what’s best is all about playing it safe and following stereotypical formulas for success. They want to see you get a steady job that yields enough money, so that you can pay your bills and live a comfortable life. The easiest and surest way for them to ensure you get that is if you follow the rules of how other people have done so.

Rather than start this article by counting all the ways your loved ones have failed supporting your dreams and career aspirations, I purposely chose to show you that whatever they told you comes from a place of love. No matter how misguided their advice or opinion may be, you owe to understand that they always teach you what they think is good for you, based on what they’ve known and experienced themselves.

Your Purpose Comes First

That being said, you also can’t help but feel that their misguided stance towards your Life Purpose is drowning your confidence and motivation to follow and thrive on it. Your friends and family are the people who are supposed to love you and accept you for who you are, thus, they owe to support your choices whatever these are. They are the people you trusted with your innermost fears, desires and vulnerabilities, and that’s why their opinion and support matter to you.

There is nothing more beautiful than sharing your dreams with those who accept them and encourage you to follow them. However, when this isn’t the case it’s vital to put your purpose first and do whatever it takes to protect yourself. Protecting yourself from unsupportive friends and family doesn’t have to end up in fighting, holding grudges, or distancing yourself from them, especially when you know they mean well.

Use This Script

Conversely, protecting yourself from judgment is all about using simple psychological tricks to say things the right way. If you are currently dealing with friends or family members trying to dissuade you from following your Life Purpose, here’s what you should say:

“Thank you for looking out for me. I know that all you want for me is to be happy, and I understand that you are trying to help. I know that you want to protect me from making a mistake, but I’m sure you’ll agree that people learn from their mistakes, and sometimes these are the best lessons they can get. Just as you’ve learned from your own mistakes, I feel that I need to follow my own path and learn from my own.”

I’ve tested this script with my parents and many of my friends, and in all cases they fully understood my viewpoint and dropped any effort of preventing me to follow my purpose. The success of this script is based on three simple psychological tricks that you can use to write your own personalised script:

1. Show gratitude: Tell them how glad you are that they are looking out for you. This will neutralise any previous tension between you because you are shifting the attention to something that you both care about, you.
2. Make it about them: Draw from their own personal history and bring up examples where they strayed from the crowd to follow their path. By relating to their story and emphasising that it all turned out well for them, they’ll feel more at ease with you following your own path.
3. Be direct: Don’t say you’ll consider their opinion, as this will enable them to keep asserting it. Instead, be honest and commit to your decision, leaving no room for judgment.