About Responsibility for Other People's Experiences

If we're fair to those we love, we will take our own past experiences into account before passing judgment on what they say and do.  These experiences overwhelmingly affect our beliefs, morals, and personal philosophy and those of others are bound to be different from ours.  So spoke Rob Dial in a recent of his Mindset Mentor podcasts...beyond being true to ourselves and behaving in a charitable and decent manner, we are indeed NOT responsible for what others think of us since they are doing so by filtering us through their own experiences.  It gets more convoluted, though.  Dial quotes American socialist Charles Cooley, "I am not who I think I am, I am not who you think I am...I am who I think you think I am".  As social herd creatures we tend to act (or not act) according to how we perceive others reacting to what we do.  But there is no way we can do (or not do) anything without some people objecting and criticizing us.  Better to go back and just be true to our own values and goals and let the chips fall where they may.  It's been my experience that most folks will adapt themselves to accommodate others' quirks and differing beliefs...conformity for its own sake is a death trap spiral.  And deliberately hiding our own talents in the presence of others just to "fit it" is a symptom of this destructive belief pattern.  Time to redefine who "I am" by filtering out our perceived impressions, real or imagined, of how others might define us according to factors in their own experiences of which even they might be unaware...