Epictetus asks his students a question most people do not want answered honestly: who gave other people permission to determine your inner state?
At some point — usually early, usually in response to something threatening — you handed over a portion of your self-regulation to the opinions of others. Their approval became a signal you were safe. Their disapproval became a signal you were in danger. The mechanism was useful then. It may be running your life now in ways that have nothing to do with actual safety.
Other people's opinions fall entirely in the category of ouk eph' hēmin — not up to you. You cannot control them. You cannot reliably produce them. You cannot keep them once produced. The person who structures their self-regulation around something fundamentally uncontrollable has built their inner life on a foundation that can be destabilised by anyone, at any time.
Marcus Aurelius returns to this territory repeatedly in the Meditations — writing as the most watched man in the Roman world. His practice was the deliberate cultivation of what he called the inner citadel — the part of the self that opinions cannot reach. Not because he was indifferent to his effect on people. Because he understood that the self built on others' approval is perpetually at their mercy, and a self at perpetual mercy cannot govern justly, decide clearly, or act from its own deepest understanding.
The diagnostic: notice the gap between what you do when observed and what you do when certain no one is watching. The size of that gap is a precise measure of how much of your behaviour is regulated by external opinion rather than internal value.
One is a self. The other is a reputation. They are not the same thing.