How To Not Take Things Personally
I want you to imagine for a moment that you are just waking up. The summer sun greets you with a warm smile. You are feeling energized and ready to take on the day. You stretch and move through your space, knowing that you are creating a life you love. Stepping outside to visit your garden, you move through each row, taking care of your plants and watering the dark, rich soil. As you come to the next row, you find that the sweet bunnies bounding through the yard have feasted on all the delicious vegetables you have worked so hard to cultivate.
In that moment you have a choice: you can get angry, blame the bunny, and set traps, or you can acknowledge that while you didn’t get to enjoy the kale, or the strawberries that had been growing all season, you did get to enjoy the journey of planting, and tending the garden, and that someone, in fact, did get to enjoy eating them. While it may be disheartening, you know it’s not a personal attack on you. Your garden wasn’t singled out, and you simply don’t take this act personally.
But let’s say that a friend hurts your feelings. They invite someone else to attend a concert with them that you wished you could go to. Your friend is posting videos on social media, having a grand time, and you are home, feeling left out. While it’s perfectly ok to feel annoyed or offended, it isn’t going to make you feel any better or be helpful to your friendship. When we are in a place of taking things personally, we almost automatically have a response to this. We may feel sad, angry, or feel tense and out of sorts.
For as beautifully different as each of us are, we are all made of the same energy. We all have the same delicate soft spot, that wants to be loved and accepted. Generations of humans have been retaliating when that soft spot feels threatened, and often, we are absolutely terrified to be vulnerable or lose our purchase on power and control… so we grasp, we react…
It’s not all about you
In the Book, The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, Don Miguel Ruiz explores self-limiting beliefs, one most notably, “Don’t Take Anything Personally”. In reading, we learn the startling discovery that when we take things personally, what we are really doing is directly relating negative outcomes to ourselves. We are, in short, making it all about us.
Let’s go back to our story about the friend at the concert…the next day we learn that the other person they took to the concert was having a really terrible day, they lost their job, and needed to blow off some steam. Suddenly it feels ok again, because we know their choice wasn’t “personal”, they didn’t pick us last. But what has happened to us during the process? We have wasted precious moments and energy feeling angry and hurt.
Physical Stress Response
Fear, criticism, and tension build up in our bodies when we take something personally, creating a stress response that most likely does not serve us.
Tips to help calm the physical stress response:
Take care of yourself. The physical stress response can be a powerful one! Be sure to fill your body with nourishing foods, hydrate and move a little more. In a recent study at UCLA, researchers found that three to five 45-minute exercise sessions a week delivered optimal mental health benefits. (UCLA)
Try to eliminate the stress. Is it possible for you to reframe the way you are thinking about situations? We can only control ourselves, not others, and remembering that we have all the power and are in control of our own happiness is huge!
Breathe. Join the weekly Wednesday Breathing Break and restore balance to your stressed system.
I hope this helps you shift your mindset and reminds you that you are not always under attack, you are worth choosing, and you have the freedom to do what you wish with this beautiful, messy, life.
Additional Resources
Ten Minute Practices to ease anxiety (Read Here)
Weekly Wednesday Lunch Breathing Break (Register Here)
Read a sample from the Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom! (Listen Here)