'Log Kya Kahenge?' Why We Care So Much About What Others Think, and Why Self-Esteem is the Only Answer
- Jun 4
- 7 min read
Updated: Jun 5
Written by Roje Khalique, Founder of rkTherapy
Roje Khalique is a visionary clinical consultant with 20 years of experience in mental health. She is the founder of rkTherapy, a London-based bespoke psychology consultancy, and a specialist in culturally attuned Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).
You already know what log kya kahenge means. You have known it your whole life; it was in the air of every room you grew up in. In Hindi and Urdu, it is log kya kahenge. In Bengali, it is manush ki bolbe. The words are different, but the weight they carry for women who grew up hearing them is the same. What follows is not a pep talk. It is an explanation, biological, cultural, and structural, of why that weight exists and what it has quietly been doing to you.
The neuroscience of belonging and fear
To the brain, approval means safety, and disapproval means danger. When people reject or criticise us, our brain registers it as a physical injury. Brain scans show that social rejection activates the anterior cingulate cortex, the same region that processes physical pain. This is not a South Asian trait; it is basic human biology. Your brain treats the threat of log kya kahenge with the same urgency as a physical attack.
In collectivist cultures, this wiring is built into daily life. Your private actions affect the reputation of your whole family and community. Your family models this rule, your community enforces it, your school rewards it, and your workplace inherits it. The fear of what people will say hits you from every angle before you are old enough to question it.
This is why simply telling a woman from a collectivist background to stop caring what others think does not work. Caring about the group is not a weakness; it is how she was taught to survive. For a high-achieving bi-cultural woman of Asian or Black heritage, this pressure does not arrive from one direction. It is built into your body, your history, and every institution you have ever walked into.
The curriculum nobody names
During your first eighteen years of life, building true self-esteem is rarely the goal. Instead, you are taught a hidden curriculum: be good, do more, do not cause trouble, get top results, and always ask yourself what people will say or think. Your self-worth is not based on who you are; it is based on how much you produce and how well you meet other people's expectations. This creates a subconscious programme that many bi-cultural, high-achieving professionals still run today, long after leaving the classrooms where it was written.
The problem is not unique to collectivist cultures. In different ways, both collectivist and individualist systems often leave people without a solid internal foundation of self-esteem. The expression of the problem may differ, but the absence of self-esteem remains. The system is not one thing; it is the combination of family expectations, educational reward structures, workplace hierarchies, gender norms, and cultural messages that teach us our value comes from performance and approval. What is rarely taught is how to build a strong sense of self that exists independently of either.
The rule that was always going to fail you
When we care too much about log kya kahenge, we learn that over-giving gets us liked and rewarded. In many Asian cultures, a good daughter helps before anyone asks, a sister keeps the peace, and a wife absorbs anger to protect the family name. The secret rule becomes: if I give more, do more, and stay quiet, I will be accepted, and I will belong.
You bring this rule into your degree, your career, and your relationships. But grades and job titles are validated by someone else. The moment someone questions them, your whole structure shakes. Your CV grows, but your self-esteem stays low because you outsourced your worth to other people's metrics. In patriarchal workplaces, you may work twice as hard and still be ignored for that promotion. So, your subconscious programme draws a devastating conclusion: if I am doing everything right, in fact, giving more, doing more, and it is still failing, I must be the problem.
Imposter syndrome is log kya kahenge by another name
For South Asian women, imposter syndrome is not a new condition. It is the log kya kahenge cultural software applied to professional life. The fear of being caught out as not good enough or a fraud is the old childhood question with a different name: what will people say about me?
The term imposter syndrome comes from a 1978 study by Clance and Imes, which looked only at high-achieving white women. Here is the problem with applying that to women living between cultures. We are all wired to care what others think; that is not a flaw, it is biology. For our ancestors, belonging to the group was survival. That wiring does not disappear just because we grew up. For many women of Asian or Black heritage, there is a second layer. You are not just carrying the childhood question of "Am I good enough?" You are carrying it into workplaces that were never designed to tell you that you are. That is not a confidence problem; it is a structural one. For many women navigating bias, exclusion, or invisibility, the fear can feel entirely rational. When the environment repeatedly communicates that you are an outsider, questioning whether you belong is not evidence of a syndrome. It is evidence that your nervous system is paying attention.
Cokley (2024) argues that framing impostor feelings as a personal "syndrome" incorrectly blames the individual rather than the hostile or racialised systems causing the distress. For Asian and Black professionals, invisibility or lack of representation can translate into: "I got lucky, I am an imposter." It is a rational response to systems designed to communicate that you do not belong. You cannot fix imposter syndrome while the software that created it is still running. When you stay quiet in a meeting, replay a conversation at 2 a.m., overthink an email, apologise before speaking, or agree to more work when you are already overwhelmed, that is your amygdala in survival mode. The modern corporate threat will not kill you, but your nervous system does not know that yet.
In my work with high-achieving bi-cultural women, I rarely find a lack of capability. I find a lifetime of conditioning that taught them to measure their worth through responsibility for other people's feelings and thoughts, approval, and achievement. Many arrive believing confidence is the problem. Yet beneath the overthinking, perfectionism, people-pleasing, and self-doubt is often something else entirely: a fragile sense of self-worth that was never given the opportunity to develop independently of approval and performance.
What self-esteem actually looks like
Self-esteem is often misunderstood as confidence. They are not the same thing. Confidence grows from competence. Self-esteem comes from your relationship with yourself, even if you lack confidence.
Self-esteem looks like saying no without spending three days feeling guilty. It is receiving criticism without questioning your entire identity. It is allowing someone to be disappointed with you without immediately abandoning your own needs. It is entering a room without deciding your value based on who notices you. It is holding your own position while remaining connected to the people you love. When self-esteem is present, other people's opinions still matter, they simply stop determining who you are.
True adaptation in environments that may question your worth is not performing competence for external approval. It is learning to negotiate expectations, hold a position under pressure, and remain recognisably yourself across both worlds, personal and professional, collectivist and individualistic cultures. True self-esteem is a strong sense of who you are, what you want, and what you value, completely independent of your performance or other people's approval, and it does not shift when the audience changes.
The foundation that was never built
Whether we like to admit it or not, grades and titles are external rewards validated by someone else's metrics. The moment those shift, a restructure, a difficult manager, a family that moves the goalposts, your internal ground shifts with them. Without the foundation of self-esteem, you shapeshift to match whatever the room wants. You confuse self-abandonment with loyalty. You measure love by how much you give rather than how people treat you, and achieving more will not fix this; it just raises the bar for the next thing you must do to prove your worth.
Here is the truth that neither culture gives you: you cannot reject your collectivist values; they are part of who you are. Simply setting boundaries as Western individualism prescribes does not work either, because it asks you to abandon the relational values your identity was built around. The answer is not a cultural choice; it is self-esteem.
When you know who you are, what you want, and how you feel about yourself, you can negotiate from that place, within your family, within your workplace, within both worlds. Not from fear of what others will say, but from a forever-growing sense of who you are. The question was never whether people would talk, they always will. The real question is whether your relationship with yourself is strong enough to remain intact when they do. Self-esteem is not about learning to stop caring about people. It is learning not to lose yourself for their approval or even for your own success metrics.
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Roje Khalique, Founder of rkTherapy
Roje is a clinical practitioner for a wide range of anxiety disorders and depression. She is dedicated to making quality psychological support accessible to high-achieving professionals in the legal and finance industries in London's high-stakes corporate world. During COVID-19, she recognised a global and increasing need for evidence-based support and developed a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) online, virtual platform and a mobile app. Designed to fit the demanding schedules of professionals not only in London but across Europe, the US, the Middle East, and Asia.
