Self-Care Tool #10 Choose to be Around People You Love I used to spend a lot of time trying to get people to like me. In fact, the less they liked me, the more I tried to get them to like me. It was such a subtle activity I didn’t realize I was doing it. I would say things I thought they wanted to hear. I would agree with their opinions and try to please and impress them with how I enter- tained, how I communicated, and how responsive I was to requests. I would actually put pressure on myself to abide by the actions I made up in my head about how they wanted me to act. The crazy part about it is that most of them would have liked me just fine even if I wasn’t trying. More importantly, and actually quite shocking to me now, is I didn’t consider whether or not I liked them. Honestly, I was so caught up in being liked that I never asked myself what my own opinion was. This was a very difficult pattern to break. Somewhere along the line, I lost respect for my own opinion. Am I hungry? Do I like this food? Do I even like this person? What I realized is that I had many people in my life who liked me and I wasn’t sure if I liked them. Isn’t that strange? I had no idea if I liked 175 • If IAm So Smart, Why Can’t I Lose Weight?