How To Deal With Being Misunderstood
We’ve all been misunderstood at one point in our life.
You’ve tried to help a friend and it turned out badly. You’ve told something positive and it was understood the other way around.
This never feels good but we have created an automatic response to protect ourselves from being hurt. Most of the time, this manifests as a string of sentences trying to justify whatever just happened.
One of the most frustrating types of misunderstandings is having your goals misunderstood.
My main goal, in the long run, is to inspire people to become life-long learners and realize how languages can be the most rewarding type of learning experience.
In order to achieve this, there are a number of skills I need to acquire, among which can be found the capacity to inspire with my words, to organize my thoughts more clearly to express them or to learn more varied languages to never forget the importance of those to me.
There are numerous other skills I need to get and most of what I now do should pile up in time and allow me to achieve my goals.
Yet, long-term goals can never truly be understood by others because they are too deeply ingrained in us, in our experience and view of life.
Trying to force others to understand you will only create frustration so, instead of looking for outside satisfaction, you should be looking for the internal satisfaction of evolving as a person.
Keeping a clear picture of your goals in your head is the first step to overcoming this feeling of being misunderstood.
If you know why you have said goal and how you plan on reaching it, you will obtain enough self-confidence to overcome all troubles which come your way.
Obviously, this self-confidence cannot be gained in one day, so you need to cultivate the skill of patience.
Our society has made us impatient. We want everything right now and will try our best for a short period of time before giving up altogether a few days or weeks later.
Have you ever tried to learn a language to a high level by working hours on end once in a while? I know I have and I have seen many people do it too. Spending 4–5 hours in a row every Saturday will not allow you to improve as much as 15 minutes a day every single day.
Small actions compound themselves to create great results.
What the rest of the world will see as not connected at all will slowly combine and transform into a much larger result than you could have ever imagined.
I find Tom Bilyeu to be a great example of this. His goal is to create the next Disney company. This is clearly an impressive goal but looking at what he had been doing seemed to me to have no connection whatsoever with it.
Yet, his show, Impact Theory, aimed towards self-improvement is building an image for his company and tackling a similar project from so many different angles is slowly imitating Disney. Indeed, if we think Disney movie, we automatically have an image of what the movie would be like.
This stem from Disney’s movies having all had a similar mindset and ways of presenting the content. This cannot be said about a Paramount movie for instance.
If you only look at the surface, there are always aspect you will be missing about others. And this works for you too. If people misunderstand about you, it surely is because they cannot see the big picture of your goals.
So ignore being misunderstood. Or even better, acknowledge it and bathe in it. If you keep your eyes on your goal and realize there will always be misunderstood aspects in your life, you will be able to improve time after time.
No matter what your goal is, no matter if people tell you it’s crazy, keep working at it. And one day you can tell yourself:
I knew I could do it all along.
