Protect yourself by knowing what to share and what to keep private

You can't live life without relating with people, but how you choose to relate can make or break you. People have ended up at the wrong side of the law because they made a mistake of opening up to people they never should have. There are things you should keep to yourself, no matter how close a person is to you.

The question of what to keep to yourself is something nobody ever really teaches you how to do. Most people just learn through experience and it's mostly not in the fun way. They say experience is the best teacher but I say it's also the roughest.

It's something you learn through your mistakes, through the times you've let your emotions get the better of you and you've confided in the wrong person and also through the times you've kept your mouth shut when you should've spoken up.

Privacy is different from secrecy and that's an important distinction you need to know about if your intention is to be a winner in life.

If there's anything I have learned the hard way, it's that keeping something private is in many ways a means of protection and don't let any toxic person guilt trip you into thinking otherwise. Not all emotions require an audience, but then of course, there is the way of keeping things private that is really just people's excuse for keeping things hidden and for avoiding because of fear of retaliation from others. And that I think is a different story altogether, but I'm just going to tell you it's something that will likely end up costing you slowly but surely.

The main issue I've seen is that sharing something does not necessarily equate to closeness. In fact I would even argue that more often than not, sharing something would end you at giving a part of yourself to someone who wasn't really prepared to accept it and now you're both in an awkward position because of it.

Good relationships have a certain level of selective honesty to them, but it's not dishonest. It's more considered. You're neither putting on a show of openness, nor are you putting on a show of composure. You're really making a choice each time about how you should be handling things.

To help you out, I have written down a cool guide myself to help you know about the things in your life you should not share with people.

Image created by me