Not taking things personally doesn’t make you a doormat.
In your everyday life you deal with many individuals who have different personalities, attitudes and mindsets. Some encounters with others pass peacefully and smoothly, other encounters may involve simple quarrels, misunderstanding or they may become very annoying when you feel offended by others’ bad behavior toward you. Unfortunately, most of these encounters are unavoidable.
You may also feel offended when you are not part of the situation like when a college telling his opinion about something or by a social media post written by someone who doesn’t even know you.
Whenever you feel offended, ill-treated, victimized or completely ignored you are the party who is responsible for this feeling.
Have you ever felt offended by a mentally-ill person’s behavior toward you or by the behavior of a child? No you haven’t. In other situations (if you kept watching your reactions) you will find that the same behavior you take as offensive from someone you don’t consider it offensive from someone else. This proves that you are in control of how you feel about others behavior toward you even if you don’t actually believe so. It looks much like someone throws a burning ball toward you, would you reach up to hold it?
People usually listen to what you say you through their own conditioning about what you are saying or how you are saying it. Most people have insecurities you don’t know about; when you challenge their insecurities you actually trigger mental images that irritate them so they get more hostile in order to dismiss feeling insecure.
When dealing with a subordinate who seems to be careless, it is not out of disrespect to you, most of time it comes to his lack of self-confident or his under-motivation to take the task you assigned to him but he would never admits it.
When speaking about gender equality, some people get hostile because of what you are trying to convey to them. They might have been heavily conditioned against the concept and how it will affect the society. From their perspective they are trying to protect the beliefs they are familiar with, not about attacking you.
Those who had failed to achieve a certain goal would try to convince you that it is not attainable either because they actually don’t want you to fail, or because they fear what your success would make them feel, or they might be left alone after your success. This is not about you; this is about their own insecurities and lack of self-confidence.
Dealing with someone who is emotionally unavailable doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you, rather it is related to his inability to share his emotions.
Not receiving the appreciation you expected from someone doesn’t necessarily make you a failure, rather it show his lack of courtesy.
None of the above examples nor others is about you, yet your ego deludes you into believing so with thoughts like “I shouldn’t be treated like this”,” what others would think of me?”, “this person disrespects and disregards me”, or “what would happened if I allow this behavior to continue?”
Feeling offended makes you emotional which means you have taken some of the other person’s negativity, you become unable to think clearly and unable to decide how to respond effectively and powerfully. The less you take things personally the more you become able to deal them.
Each person, to some extent or another, has his own version of reality, according to his upbringing, education, life encounters and so on. He sees and listens only through his conditioning and experience, whatever you say or do is actually interpreted through a barrier of thoughts and emotions. Therefore, each one’s behaviour is completely about what goes on in his mind and heart, how insecure he feels, what conflicts he is going through and how worthy he feels.
For most situations in your life you are not part of others’ agenda as you might believe. Let go of the burden of taking anything personally, because it has never been about you, whatever someone does, only defines him.
You May also like How often do you judge yourself?.
