We tend to believe that others are always focused on us. We got a strange bias going on there. For instance, when we do something embarassing, we believe, everybody remembers it. Reality is: most of the times when we feel embarassed, many people won´t perceive it as embarrassing. They just got another point of view and might have a completely different interpretation of the situation. Many others don´t get it due to awareness factors. They might simply be concentrated on something else, looking at something else or ruminating about something. We also think that other people remember our embarrassing situations. The truth is, that others forget things like that very fast. (You can countercheck that, by trying to remember something embarrassing that happened to someone else…hard, isn´t it?)

The spotlight effect (Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky, 2000) is something that is well proven. We always tend to think we are more in the focus of others, than we actually are. We are taking ourselves far too serious. But that is only the tip of the iceberg: the spotlight effect is only a small part of a huge bias. An incredibily silly thing we all tend do do makes no sense at all: We tend to believe, we can guess what others think. As a conselor, I´ve heard that probably thousands of times: the person x is sure, that another person y is thinking such and such about them and, guess what, it is always negative. I want to name this “guessing the spotlight”. If you work with so many people as close as I do, you figure out:  They are almost never right about what others think. People tend to think about completely different things and have a unique response to it (just in case they are even responding!). Also there is no “the others are thinking such and such”, for everybody is thinking something completely different! Also guessing the negativity you can be entirely wrong. The probability that you are wrong guessing other people´s thoughts is very, very high.

Start changing your belief now. Whenever you think

“X is thinking something negative about me”, tell yourself “I have no idea what this person is thinking about”.

Whenever you think “the others are thinking bad about me”, say to yourself “Every single person is thinking completely different”.

And when you do something really embarrassing: “Many people didn´t realize it and if, they´ll forget it straight away”.

If you strenghten these beliefs, refering to psychological research, you are much more rational than you´ve been before. Because in most of the cases you´ll be right. You might not be right in all cases, but that doesn´t matter. That´s a risk you can easily take without having any negative consequences.

Other ideas:

” I am not the center of the world- nobody will remember what I did yesterday”

“I don´t have a clue what others are thinking about”

“They are all thinking predominantly about themselves”

 

Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(02), 211–222