I often take my queue as to what subject to choose for my blog posts from the questions I get. Over the last few weeks, I received this question, in one form or another, several times. Ok dear readers, I’m listening. 🙂 Some of the emails I received were much too personal for me to publish, even in an abridged form, so I’ll just give you some fictional examples of the many ways this question can be asked:

“This girl at school called me a bitch. How can I get her to stop? I don’t want people to be mean to me. I want them to like me.”

“Some guy left a nasty comment on my blog. What should I say to him? Can I use the law of attraction to make him nicer?”

“There’s a guy I like. Can I make him fall in love with me?”

Now, while I’ve answered the question regarding making a specific person fall in love with you here and here, it falls into the same general category as the other two questions: Caring way too much about what others think of us.

Can we use the Law of Attraction to make people in general, or anyone specific, like us?

The short answer is: no. And once you’ve listened to my explanation, hopefully, you’ll no longer want to.

You can’t create other people’s reality

Simply put, you can’t force others to do, think or be anything. You can only control your own vibration, your own energy, your own thoughts and beliefs. You can create your reality, but not someone else’s. That’s just not how it works.

So, if some girl at school called you a bitch, or a troll left you a nasty comment on your blog, you cannot suddenly turn that troll into a nice person. The reason they’re in such a dark place that dumping on others actually causes them to feel relief, has nothing to do with you. And you can’t force them to raise their vibration until they’re in a happy, joyful, loving place. Everyone is in charge of their own energy. Period.

The “trolls” are actually a very useful indicator

It really, truly is all about YOUR vibration and your own personal reality. While you can’t control others, the fact remains that you’ve allowed this experience into your personal universe. Something in your vibration was a match to being dumped on. And this nasty person, if you’re willing to see it that way, has actually done you a favor by mirroring this vibration back to you, so that you can become aware of it. They are actually a manifestation of yours.

When someone criticizes you, and you get upset about it, the belief that attracted this experience is almost always this: You care more about what other people think about you than what you think about yourself, and you’re afraid that they might be right in their criticism.

You’re giving away your power

It’s easy to see why the belief that the opinion of others matters more than our own is so pervasive. We are raised to look for validation from sources outside of ourselves. When mommy or teacher smiles at us, we’ve done a good job. When they frown, we’ve failed. We tie our self-esteem to the approval, or lack thereof, of other people. And then we do our best to fit into whatever box they want us to, hoping to please them, so that we can finally feel good about ourselves.

But that’s a bunch of crap based on a pile of false beliefs. When we tie our emotional health to the reaction of anyone outside of ourselves, we give away all of our power. We can never change enough to make someone else happy. Even if we can temporarily please them, the second they find some new condition to want, we’re back to square one. It’s a losing battle.

So, the girl at school called you a bitch and you felt horrible. But the reason you felt horrible isn’t because she called you a bitch, it’s because you felt diminished by it. You wondered if maybe there’s something wrong with you. You allowed this person, whom you don’t really care about (and whom you may not even know) to dictate how you feel about yourself, as if her opinion actually mattered. Now, you could, hypothetically, try really, really hard to become someone that she’ll approve of. You could contort yourself and become this fake person whose sole purpose is to please bitch girl. But why would you do that? You’d essentially be handing her the rights to your emotional health, telling her to do with them whatever she pleased. You’d be handing all of your power away. Not only that, but you’d be handing it to a person that you don’t even really care about!

You CAN control your own reality

Now, while you can’t control what others think or how they behave, you CAN control your own reality. Let me explain:

You can clean up your own vibration to such an extent that you won’t be a match to being called a bitch or being dumped on anymore. This means, that the people who are looking to dump on someone, won’t be able to find you. Your realities won’t match up. They’ll go and find someone else, who is a match. You can align your own energy with the vibration of Nice People, and only rendezvous with individuals who will be nice to you. It’s your energy that attracts them to you or repels them away from you.

You can’t decide WHO will be nice to you (again, that would be creating in their reality), but you can attract only pleasant people who are already nice and therefore will also be nice to you. It’s up to you what kinds of experiences you match up with.

But in order to match up with niceness, you have to take back the control over your emotions. You have to be the one who determines how you feel. You have to get rid of the idea that what others think about you matters.

Every time you get upset by what someone said you to, that negative emotion is telling you that you’ve got an active vibration within you that just created that experience. Only by getting to the point where others can no longer upset you (i.e. you’ve released that vibration) will you be able to allow a reality where such experiences don’t exist.

What to do when you’re criticized:

When someone criticizes you and you get upset, it’s only because you’re afraid they might be right. Analyze that thought and really take it apart. Ask yourself the following questions and really ponder them:

1.)    Does this person’s opinion really matter more than my own? Do they have any special skills that make them more qualified to judge a person’s intrinsic worth than I am? (Hint: the answer is NO!)

2.)    Is what they said about me actually true? Can I think of any examples of when it hasn’t been true? (Example: “Am I really a bitch? Are there any examples of when I’ve been a nice person?”)

3.)    Why am I giving this person the right to determine how I feel about myself? Why am I letting anyone determine that?

4.)    Do I believe that I have the power to change how I feel? Can I change how I react? (Hopefully, the answer to this will be “yes”.)

Hopefully, at this point, you’ve decided that giving all that power to his person isn’t a good idea. Here’s a few more pointers:

  • DO NOT confront this person. You’d only be doing so to try to change their mind (even if you’re just wanting to know why they criticized you, it would ultimately be with the goal of using the information to make yourself more likeable.) And why would you want to change their mind unless you still care what they think? Also, never feed the trolls.
  • I know it’s counterintuitive, but try to send some gratitude towards this person. You don’t have to go and thank them, this is an exercise in your own mind, but if you can shift your perspective from “Why are they so mean to me?!” to “Wow. This is an indicator of a vibration I have that isn’t serving me, and this person helped to show me that”, you’ve pretty much done the job.

A personal example

I will give you an example from my own life, because sometimes it’s easier to recognize this situation in other people: When I wrote a post about cursing, I used a funny and provocative subject to make the point that words don’t actually matter, the energy behind them does. I received a very nasty email from a subscriber who wanted me to know that she was deeply offended by my post.

Now, I had two choices: I could let the opinion of one person, whom I had never met and knew nothing about, make me feel awful. I could’ve spent days wallowing in despair about how someone out there didn’t like my post. I could’ve even come to the conclusion that I’d done something wrong and that perhaps I should censor myself in the future. But if I’d done that, my writing would no longer be authentic and honest. Even though I get tons of emails every day telling me how helpful my words were to someone, I could’ve used this person’s opinion as an excuse to feel horrible and maybe even destroy my blog.

Instead, I recognized that her being offended said a lot more about her than it did about me. If she didn’t like my post, there was nothing I could do about that. She simply wasn’t a match to my writing. I could, however, focus on those who do resonate with me and like what I write. And that’s what I did. I thought the fact that she would get so angry over a simple, little blog post, that no one forced her to read, was actually kind of funny. Clearly she was a match to being offended, and I had served the purpose of giving her something to be offended by. Yay me. And yes, I was very proud of myself, because the fact that I didn’t react negatively meant I’d successfully shifted my vibration on this subject. There was a time when that email would’ve left me devastated.

Interestingly enough, that was the first and last nasty mail I got. My energy is determining my experience. Do you see how ridiculous it would’ve been for me to get upset or take this criticism seriously? Do you see how ridiculous it is for you to do the same?

Take back your power!

No one has the right to determine how you feel except you. And no one can ever take that away from you, but you can hand it to them, and people do it all the time. If the barrista smiles at you and tells you look nice today, you’re in a good mood. If your boss yells at you, even if you know it’s only because he had another fight with his wife, you get angry. But you don’t have to let the actions and opinions of others dictate how you feel. You can take back your power, right now. You can shift your energy and decide to feel good, no matter what. You deserve it. But don’t take my word for it… 🙂

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  • Hi Melody,

    Thanks for this article! I understand that it’s about where our vibration is and how we’ve lined up vibrationally to receive criticism/negativity but I have a question about the way we react. For example, someone is rude to me so I get defensive and am rude back. Then I read your wonderful blog and acknowledge that I have the power to determine how I feel. Now I feel guilty for reacting with negativity and I want to show this person I’m not actually the meanie they think I am. I know you say we can’t control someone else’s experience but can I use the Law of Attraction to make amends? Or I can’t unless this person is also at my vibrational level?

  • This is a really excellent article. I always wondered how I can use the law of attraction to effect my relationships with people. Now I am clear on what my goals should be in this area.

  • Wow, this was an awesome post, Melody! Here in the big city where I’m located, we are always afraid and apologize in advance all the time if we are being offensive or not, even for little things that are actually funny to those of us who vibrate at a certain level. In some places of the world, there is a term for these people, but it would offend them too, so I won’t mention it. I do agree that it is the problem of the person being offended, but then again, the vibrations are not a match, so we should not give a rip.
    WHATEVER!

    • Hey Kat,

      I wouldn’t go out of my way to offend someone. That’s not my intention, ever. But if I’m aligned and doing what feels right and good and they still choose to be offended, then bluntly put, yeah, it’s their issue. If I can help to soothe them and shift them, I will. But I won’t compromise who I am just so that someone out there won’t be offended. If i did that, I’d have to shut down my blog and never speak again. Because everything is offensive to someone out there… 🙂

      Huge hugs!
      Melody

  • I think it easy to pander to those who think the way we do. But I think it take a strong and insightful individual to address a reader who doesn’t agree. As you stated the problem the reader had may have been more about her than yourself. But what would it have hurt for you to openly address her concerns? Asked the reader why what you wrote offended her. Being open to criticism may have allowed you growth. I purposely seek out those different from me to allow myself growth. In a group that think the same and react the same where is the growth or development? I think it to be stagnate.

    • Hey Fashionistachic,

      Welcome to Deliberate Receiving.
      I don’t believe I was pandering to this person who didn’t agree with me. People disagree with me all the time and I’m happy to have those discussions. But when someone decides that they are going to be offended by your differing point of view and have no interest in hearing what you actually have to say, I don’t see much value in engaging with them. I use my intuition on these things. I have no need for people to agree with me, but if I can’t have a meaningful and open minded discussion, it just isn’t any fun for me. I won’t get into sling-fests or screaming matches or their email equivalent, but I’m certainly open to criticism, as long as it’s done from an authentic point of view. So, if someone has a well thought out point of view that happens to differ from mine, I’m very happy to listen to it. That’s how you learn new angles and perspectives. It just has to be done in the spirit of debate or discussion, not anger and hatred. The intention of the other party is really important and how I feel about the exchange is the deciding factor.

      Thanks so much for chiming in with your valuable perspective.

      Hugs,
      Melody

  • This is a great article. So many people ask if they can use the Law of Attraction to control or change the behavior of others. Thanks for a great explanation of that perception.

    I agree that what we experience is the result of our vibration and what we are drawing to us. May I suggest Ho’oponopono, which removes negative vibrations, energy and data, allowing the Divine to work through us.

    For those not familiar with Ho’oponopono, google “Dr. Hew Len” or read “Zero Limits” by Joe Vitale. I was introduced to this system by my medical Qigong practitioner and have been using it for several months.

    Although it is not a quick fix, but a long term change, I have already seen some difference in my experience.

  • Hi Melody great post, very interesting read I like the way you Broke down the subject and give real example’s, controlling our personal vib is a art and I think our job is to master this art, thanks for bring me a step closer

    Blessing

  • Hi Melody–right on. I like how you always keep the boundaries of ownership and control on the right person–we CAN’T control others (as much as we’d like to!), but only OURSELVES. And since this is the case, we must take responsibility and control what we CAN–again, ourselves. Which also means LETTING GO of what we can’t control–others!

    • Thanks Sean! Everything ultimately comes down to our own vibration. We can’t really ever shovel responsibility onto someone or something else. But that’s a hard pill to swallow sometimes…

      Hugs,
      Melody

  • Great post.

    You are back on the usual blog post 🙂

    It is already some years ago I learned this simple truths. If I meet a nasty person or somebody who criticizes me, it means that I am in nasty mood or I am criticizing somebody else. This understanding makes my life more easy, because I know how I deal with it, so conflicts are solved faster.

    But it still hurts sometimes 🙂

    Too bad that it seems to be very difficult to teach people this important life concept. If more people would understand this, the world would look completely different. It requires the ability to see and accept your personal reality without being trapped in the emotion and that is very difficult to grasp that for many people.

    Thanks for sharing.

    • Hi Marc,

      No worries, I’ll try to do about one video a week. I’m already working on the next one…

      I truly think that if everyone could understand this one point – that their being offended doesn’t make the other person bad, it’s just an indicator of something in their own belief system that isn’t serving them, then that would be the end of all war and major conflict. :o)

      Hugs,
      Melody

  • Hey Melody,
    I always look at the echo/mirror that I am getting back from the physical world to see/remind me where I am vibrationally. If I am getting a jerk in my vibrational field then they must be a match for me even though my hindsight is 20/20.

    What works best for me is to keep myself rested which I do not do nearly enough and monitoring my thoughts.

    LoL on the person who got offended by your post. Little offends me these days except bad manners.

    • Hi Justin,

      I like the term echo. What we see in our reality is very much an echo of our vibration. I’m going to play with that a bit.

      You’re right. Being rested definitely helps us to stabilize our vibration. When we’re stressed and hurried or fatigued, it’s hard to notice your emotional reaction to things and makes it harder to manage our vibration. Thanks for the valuable addition to the post!

      Hugs,
      Melody

  • Good points – yes!! Taking control of our reality will help us get control of our lives. Melody – you’re reminding us that we can’t change what happens to us but we can change how we react to it. THanks!

    • You’re so welcome Vishnu! But I do want to clarify: You can’t change what’s happening to you in this very moment. You’ve already created that. But you can change what will happen to you in your future, by cleaning up your vibration today. And you can change how you feel in this very moment (your reaction.) Just wanted to be really clear about this, lest someone reading this gets the idea that they are a victim to whatever happens to them, but they can learn to grin and bear it…

      Hugs,
      Melody

  • lol. I like your dog picture. It would have to be a pug. A pugly little pug.

    I think the trolls can still find you, you just don’t care. That’s the important part. Sometimes feedback is valid, sometimes it isn’t. If you actually ARE a bitch and someone identifies you as a bitch, they might be doing you a favor. If you aren’t and they call you one, well, then you know who the bitch ACTUALLY is, and you can strengthen up your pimp hand.

    • Ahaha. Pugly Pug. I love your sense of humor.

      But… from my point of view, as long as I’m only resonating with the frequency of those that will benefit from what I’m writing, the only trolls that can find me would be those that would actually gain some value here. The only way for me to know 100% where my vibration is at, of course, is to observe my reality. So, if one finds me, my reaction would be to check out my energy not to bring out the pimp hand, no matter how tempting. I’m stealing that, though. “Pimp hand”. Too funny. 🙂

      Hugs,
      Melody

      • Hi Melody,

        You caught me. Spending Friday night reading old posts from DR. Ouch! Actually, I’d be salsa dancing, but the class was changed to last night, so I don’t feel too pathetic. And I’ll be dancing again tomorrow night (in new way too high heels – hee hee), so I don’t feel pathetic at all!

        Years ago before I ever heard of energy work, I made a conscious decision to only spend time with people who lift me up. It works amazingly well, as you know. Occasionally somebody difficult wanders into my space, say in a public class. I smile and ignore them, same vibe as for a hesitant puppy. They either get more pleasant, or stay away from me. Yes!

        Interesting point Joe Bill makes. A negative comment to me would indicate that the person was reflecting their own need – a great opportunity to practice compassion and non-judgement. I used this if students occasionally criticized my teaching. “I’m sorry you feel that way. What would work better for you? I’d love to hear your suggestions.” (said with NO sarcasm!)

        Takes a lot of security to respond this way. Luckily, I was confident of my teaching skills. It’s harder for me to respond positively to personal criticism, though it gets easier with practice. Once we realize that criticism itself AND our emotional reaction to criticism are based in insecurity, we can be more relaxed both with ourselves and with everyone else. Life is one big mirror.

        Thanks for another woohoo post, Melody! Great way to spend a Friday evening. Hugs,

        Mary Carol

        • Hi Mary Carol,

          Don’t worry. You’re not lame, chica. I actually go out more during the week and often spend Friday night at home, working (especially now when I’m trying to get the book finished. Ack!)

          Personal criticism is generally harder to take than the professional kind, but it’s always an opportunity for growth. Basically, it shows us where our self-esteem is at. Were you able to just brush it off? Good for you. Did it destroy you? Time to start cleaning up that vibration. The degree to which criticism affects us (how bad do you feel and for how long?) shows us just how far off we are from being aligned with our inner being. This is not the same as not being able to learn from the feedback from others. The distinction is in how it affects how we feel about ourselves. I’m always trying to get better at everything that’s important to me. So, if someone criticized my cooking for example, and told me I should’ve added more salt, or whatever, I’ll take that on board. Gratefully. But I won’t feel bad about it. It’s more a case of “Yay! More information that will help me be a better cook (and I can use all of the help I can get on that one…). But if I’m self-conscious about something, and someone criticizes it, I don’t feel the same way. I’m afraid they might be right and that feels horrible. So, the easier it is for me to just listen to the information and take it as straight feedback (that I can take or leave), the cleaner my self-esteem vibration is on that subject. 🙂

          Hugs!
          Melody

          • Interesting perspective. Consider it adopted. The worse I feel, the more I need to check where my self-esteem is in that area…

            Any criticism of my appearance used to kill me – way low s-e there! I care less and less as I get older and expectations blessedly drop. Ha ha. And ironically (or not?) I feel like I look better and better as I age.

            Thanks again,

            Mary Carol

  • I’ve got two words for this post: HELL YEAH! 🙂 Love it! There is so much power in this blog that it needs to be read a few times. Most of us are guilty of letting one commment or person out of hundreds ruin our day or life because we want everyone to appreciate who we are. Or better yet, tell us who we are and how great we are in their lives…Wrong answer! There is such liberty in authencity and I can’t wait to get there. 🙂 I know where I am on the road and I will continue going until I don’t give a damn about anyone’s opinion but my own. I know that when that happens, I will look around me and be surrounded by like-minded authentic individuals.

    Melody, thanks for being a symbol of a glimpse of my future!

    Kim

    • Hi Kim!
      Once you’ve got a glimpse of authenticity (and based on what I’ve seen from you, you’ve gotten more than just a glimpse), you’ll have a much easier time finding it. You are definitely getting there! 🙂

      Hugs,
      Melody

  • Hi Melody,

    This is a really great post & an awesome topic! I think we can attract any type of circumstance that we can imagine, including being well-liked, but we can’t choose the people or create things in their life. All we can & all we really have to do is become a vibrational match to the type of condition we would like to experience.

    If there were only 10 nice people in the whole Universe, we could attract all 10 of them in to our life, if we become a vibrational match to that.

    I think that all of us cling on to specifics because of our attachments and lack of understanding of what life really is.

    Beautiful post, Melody!

    Have a great day:-)

    Josip Barbaric

    • Hi Josep! Thanks for stopping by!

      You’ve totally got it. When we let go of trying to control specific people and just align our energy with the experience we want to have, the people that match that vibration will come to us, and those who don’t, won’t be able to find us anymore. 🙂

      Hugs,
      Melody

  • Melody,

    For years I had a really hard time accepting criticism. Heck, I still do. I always took whatever action personally and when I get mad I shut down. I am a people pleaser, doing whatever I can to bring joy to someone’s elses day but I negeleted my own happiness. In retrospect I hope to learn to be able to not hold a grudge and actually take the steps you provided to use the law in my favor.

    • Hi Frank,
      I’m sure you’ve come a long way. I read your blog regularly and you don’t have that much of a problem stating what you think (true people pleasers don’t do that…) 🙂
      Your last post is a perfect example.

      I wrote a post a while back that you might like, about How To Stop Being Offended. Could be helpful…

      Hugs,
      Melody

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