How to not take things personally — 6 mind-shifting tips [Case Study]
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It was painful. I was wiped out from the 3 hour discussion we had, completely drained, emotionally exhausted — yet I still had to debrief the team.
In spite of all that, you barely get a thank you or an appreciation of the hard work that you’ve done. But well, it’s the culture where you are.
No thank yous and on top of that — having to listen to someone drone on and on about how your performance wasn’t good enough, you didn’t ask question 36, you didn’t probe deep enough.
You should have. You didn’t. You could have been better.
As with any area of life — getting feedback from others is an invaluable experience. It helps you grow. I rather someone tell me how I need to improve, than tell me everything was okay when it wasn’t.
But it is not always easy to accept feedback. Because as humans, we tend to take these things pretty personally. It feels like an attack on us, our worth and our competency. It feels awful.
And moving away from feedback random words and behaviour from strangers — people cutting in your queue, getting unnecessarily rude at the taxi stand, stepping on your toe in the subway, shoving past you to get into the lift… etc. It’s so easy to take all these things personally.
If you are anything like me, it can be difficult not to take things personally. But for our sanity and self-esteem, we have gotta learn how not to.
In this episode, I talk about the 6 ways we can shift our perspective in order to take things less personally and achieve greater personal freedom.
Originally published at https://abstractedcollective.com on September 20, 2020.
