The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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Everyone says "don't be afraid of what other people think". This is bad advice. Few people achieve it, and as @Walterodim points out, the ones who do may be bad people.
We've evolved to be social creatures. Caring about the judgment of others is human nature.
But there is hope. The people who care most about judgment are those whose positions within the tribe are precarious. For example, a young academic must be slavishly devoted to the opinions of others. Even the smallest divergence will see him cast out of the tribe forever.
On the other hand, a person of independent means need not worry so much about the judgment of others.
So, if you want to care less here is what you need to do:
Raise your status within the tribe
Build your life so you are not the client or dependent of another person
While everything you and @Walterodim type out here is true, typically the person seeking a world free of self-consciousness is rather imagining a morning not fretting over whether his ears look big, whether her knees are too knobby for shorts, whether sunlight makes one's skin look washed out, etc. Not fear of discovery if one lies about speaking French (which as you say is a healthy approach to life and prevents all sorts of problems). In other words the hell of constant mundane fretting over the probably unimportant. (Admittedly even in the situations I have listed there is probably something to be gained by at least considering each question: A new hairstyle, different fashion choices, exposure to sunlight, etc.)
My advice would be to work on becoming skilled at something. Nothing like confidence in one thing to raise general confidence. What to work on will be a matter of individual preference up to @Oopz.
This is probably a "you should reverse any advice you hear"-type thing. I suspect it's also like psychotherapy, where a minority of the population really struggles with emotional regulation and needs to work rationally on their perceptions of the world, while most people do OK and would probably just be harmed and paralyzed by a more psychoanalytical approach to their life.
Some people probably desperately need to be told to stop worrying about the dumb things they think people care about, while others probably desperately need to be told they're screwing up and they need to start worrying about the way people perceive them. These two groups just need different things, and would be harmed by following advice necessary for the other.
@DuplexFields's advice last week is probably judicious for the first group, while @MaiqTheTrue's rejoinder serves as a necessary corrective for the second:
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