Growing a tough skin...

One subject that ought to be taught in all schools is how to grow, or develop, a tough skin. That's right, an epidermis that's more like the armor of a rhinoceros than the softer baby surfaces. Life is loaded with tough times, and being resilient as well as being capable to enduring hardship and criticism can make a huge difference in the way we cruise through existence and survive with no apparent adverse effects. My point is that we're not naturally born with that tough carapace and need to train ourselves along the way to become more impervious to bad treatments and specially to demeaning comments and other forms of criticism. I'd say that the biggest obstacle to becoming tough-skinned is the urge to please that too many of us carry in them from their early childhood, when making sure that we'd meet our parents' approval must have been a mandatory token of security at the time. So the key question remain, how do we develop a tough skin?

I don't have any recipe for that form of strengthening, except that each time we are mistreated, demeaned and otherwise made fun of, there is a wonderful opportunity to turn the pain on its head and see that the punishment is only a blow to our feelings but doesn't change a bit the way we truly are inside and of course, the nature of our own intrinsic values. We just need to get over the insult and the words that hurt and transmute them into unadulterated strength. That's right, hang in there, grit your teeth and as any good politician might say: “I approve this message but don't care much about your own approval!”