Mila Joshua Yona
Personalities differ from one person to another. You will find people who are open about everything going on in their lives and yet there are those who seal almost everything from their peers. You can hardly read their lives between the lines.
Regardless, most of us have a bad habit of boosting, being proud thus wearing our hearts on our sleeves wherever we go. This can make us an open book, very predictable even to strangers.
Keeping your professional life separate from your personal life is a difficult skill to master but very vital today. You ought to be selective on who you share your secrets with because sadly not everyone has good intentions.
You also need to be keen and make sure that details of your personal life can’t be used to hurt you. It’s important to have some basic principles to keep some secrets to yourself no matter how strong the urge to share them with everyone.
Consider the list of secrets you ought to keep to yourself below;
1. Your Family Problems
Problems do exist in every family setting. Whether it’s your extended family or blood relatives causing trouble. You ought to keep the problems within the family. Don’t abuse people’s trust. They decided to confide in you with their secrets because you’re close to them but they haven’t allowed you to spread them around to everyone in your social circle.
Breaking their confidence in you can be the worst mistake you could possibly do. When you’re respectful of other people’s secrets, be rest assured they will extend the favor back to you.
2. Your good deeds
The Bible condemns practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them. (Matthew 6:1-4). If you become proud and start bragging about something good you did, you’re making it all about yourself.
You may have heard the phrase that good deeds always attract good karma. It’s true and you should always do good- however when you start bragging about it, the whole concept changes thus contradicting the good you have already created.
The greatest philanthropists in the world choose to remain anonymous for this very reason. When you embark on a charitable deed, the attention should be focused on the people or the cause that you’re helping and not on yourself.
3. Your future goals
You might find this beyond belief but there is actually some truth behind the fact that you’re likely to achieve your long-term goals if you don’t share them with people.
When you tell others about your future aspirations, you almost feel like the enjoyment of achieving the goal has been taken from you. As a result, you don’t really work hard towards it.
On the other hand, if you keep your goals to yourself, there is a higher chance of achieving them and once you achieve them, you become free to tell the whole world about them.
4. Your material belongings
As we all know, certain things in life are way more important than their cost. But sometimes we can’t help but brag about the new car we recently acquired, the new phone, the laptop we bought at an exclusive price.
No matter how much wealth you have accumulated, your colleagues don’t want to know how large you’ve been living.
It can make you appear arrogant and overly obsessed with the monetary value of things rather than their unique significance. You should try to be modest and spread it throughout your conversations with people.
5. Your past resentments
We all have our ups and downs. It could be negative stories to tell about people whom we don’t like. For example, those former colleagues that you have held a grudge against years ago and maybe still.
However, it’s best to let go of those feelings and discuss them less in public. This is because negativity is exhausting to feel and listen to. People prefer communicating with positive conservationists, those who have interesting insights, not ones that gripe about some other people they don’t even know.
Let go of whatever is weighing you down and focus on the present. You will find that more and more people will be looking for a chance to talk to you.
6. Your Income
The only people who should be allowed to know the details of your income are the people who work in the bank. Money is never a nice subject to be talked about in public because you never know what anyone’s financial position looks like. It may seem like you’re bragging and yet you don’t mean to.
Money and knowledge about your finances can shift relationships irreparably. Once your financial position becomes public knowledge, people begin to look at you differently.
That’s when you begin to attract armed robbers, thieves etc.
To save yourself from such an awkward situation, keep the details of your income in your bank statements.
Conclusion
We know that people are very much interested in one way or another about our personal lives but unfortunately, that’s in rare cases.
You need to learn to make a distinction about what conversations you make in what environments.
Just start evaluating some of those scenarios that make you become awkward and start spilling out your secrets and find ways on how you’re going to be better from now onwards.
