When there’s only crap on the menu, it’s OK to leave the restaurant and go eat somewhere else.
It’s OK, really, yet how many times did social pressure force you to endure a painful time in a place you didn’t like, eating overcooked pasta served with an industrial Bolognese sauce, trying to be nice and thanking the waiter as you left?
I did that too.
I did that in restaurants, and also relationships, jobs, you name it. I dealt with the unacceptable, muffling an infuriated voice in my head that screamed: “why don’t you grab your stuff and get the f**k outta here!”.
I was sexually abused as a kid and thought it was normal, I was 4.
I was beaten and bullied in high school, and did not retaliate for years.
I worked like a slave for a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who transgresses his chastity vows with young women, humiliates his followers and does weird things with money. And I did it without a complaint.
I worked in a company that would push their employees over the edge to get their resignation, and again, I zipped it.
I was treated like a small heap of crab manure in more situations that I can remember, but the fear of saying NO had a paralyzing effect that outweighed any sort of discomfort, so I kept my mouth shut. Executees lose all their strength when they’re about to be killed, they submit to their fate without struggle, like good horses…
With a few years of therapy and self reflexion behind me, it’s pretty obvious that most of the abuse I went through could have been avoided have I known the law of pricing.
The law of pricing is embarrassingly simple: people will treat you what you think you’re worth. If you stand tall, feeling comfortable about yourself, you’ll be left alone, but just adopt a doggy-style position for a moment…you know what to expect.
Yes, it’s a totally disgusting fact, it’s unfair and it makes me sick in my stomach too, but humans gauge each other, and many will take advantage of the weakness they perceive in someone else.
Still there’s a bright side to this societal aberration: we’re dealing with primitive traits of human psyche, the reptilians brain, the moronic part of ourselves and because it’s so primal, it’s easy to fool.
As said earlier, basic psychology shows that most people evaluate their peers by their external appearance, so there’s zillions of tips to cheat others into treating you well: body language, clothing, verbal expression. Even if you don’t feel too confident.
That’s the easy part, walmart shelves are full of literature on how to dress to impress and make the right eye contacts, most of these techniques will work, but it’s worth digging deeper: the real cause of a submissive body language being low self-esteem.
I made my own conclusions on how to cure it: whatever I think I’m worth, I multiply it x 10.
Try it for yourself, and don’t worry too much about exaggerating your value, if you landed on this page, there’s little chance you’re a self-entitled prick.
Whatever you think you’re worth, multiply it by 10. Not because your IQ has suddenly gone off-chart, or because you grew a six-pack in the last half-hour, but simply because that’s what you’ve decided.
You owe no justification to anyone, and no one really cares about what you think of yourself, anyway, self-esteem is an intimate and arbitrary parameter that needs to work for you, not against you.
Long ago, during our childhood, we were passed on the idea that we were not enough, god knows when it happened, or how many times the message was hammered into our heads. It’s probably too late to track back how worthlessness was carved in our mind: a rape, judgmental parents, failure at school or else. It really doesn’t matter.
The only thing that matters now is to dare tearing that cheap label we put on ourselves for so long and stick a fair price instead.