This past month, confidence catalyst Laura Gassner Otting discussed tips to get out of a rut on The Today Show, which included ignoring everybody. Below, Today’s Woman shares more of Laura’s insight from her Top 5 Tips to Ignore Everybody and Live Your Best Life. 

Don’t give a vote to people who shouldn’t even have a voice. 

Let’s face it: most of the people who give you advice — telling you to slow down, take smaller risks, dream a little more realistically — are doing so from a place of fear and anxiety. It’s  not about your life but about their own.  Stop letting your audacity be constrained by the limits of other people’s imaginations.  Politely excuse yourself from taking every opinion as fact, weighing them all with equal measure, and allow yourself to be your own dog, run your own race, carve your own path. And all those voices questioning your choices and telling you what you should do and need to do. They simply don’t get a vote—unless you give it to them. How? It’s time to say “Screw the Joneses.”