People often say that you shouldn’t care what other people think.

Some might limit this advice to negative or critical feedback. “The problem is,” Brené Brown writes in her book Rising Strong, “when we stop caring what people think and stop feeling hurt by cruelty, we lose our ability to connect.”

Moreover, if you deny anything which leaves you feeling uncomfortable, in your narcissism you risk lingering in delusional and erroneous beliefs, and significantly limit your growth potential.

However, there is certainly some value or truth to the suggestion to discount the opinions of others. Perhaps the problem to avoid isn’t caring what other people think, but rather misalignment of how much we care what a person thinks with how much we value that specific person.

To my point, if you simultaneously despise someone and care a lot about what they think, you’re likely setup for painful and unhelpful interactions with that person.