Do you have the courage to be disliked?

First Published 2 June 2022

Last month, my book club pick was “The Courage to Be Disliked: How to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness”.  It was unanimous that we all loved the book and have all said we will be reading it again.

Once you get past the controversial ‘trauma doesn’t exist’ statement, the concepts and learnings from the book are enlightening, if perhaps on occasion a little challenging or uncomfortable.

For me, the biggest takeaways were again all around choice.  I know I have written about choices in the past, and this is driven home clearly here – everything is a choice. 

• We can choose to sit in pain and discomfort, or we can choose to do something about it. 
• We can choose to allow our emotions to control us, or we can control our emotions and how we respond/react to them. 
• We can choose to pass judgment on others, or we can notice that the judgment is more about ourselves than about them.
• We can choose to use praise as a controlling method, or we can be grateful instead.
• We can choose to accept ourselves just as we are, or we can beat ourselves up over things that we can’t change or don’t matter to anyone but ourselves.
• We can choose to people please in the hope that we will be liked, or we can have the courage to be disliked…

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the book if you choose to read it – personally I found this one more impactful as an audiobook as I felt it needed to be read aloud, but that is the beauty of multiple formats being available 😊

I’m going to sign off now before I start getting even more gushy over my new favourite book!

PS – I just realised that it was April’s book club book that had me writing about choices – there really does seem to be a theme forming – I wonder if 4000 Weeks (this month’s book) will continue in the same vein 🤔