Oftentimes, I find myself taking things personally when people say bad things about me or say things I don’t want to hear. I’m sure that is something everyone deals with on a regular basis, be it at work, at home, or at a family get-together. The problem is, we give too much power to others’ words to an extent that we let them affect our day dwelling on them.
It’s always good to know what you’re not good at and take steps toward fixing it right? That’s why I wanted to learn how to not take things personally and start practicing the strategies in my day-to-day life. I’ve had a lot of good learnings from TED Talks in the past. So I decided to search for this topic on YouTube’s Ted Talks channel. That’s when I chanced upon this talk on “How not to take things personally”. I’ve summarized the talk and takeaways from it. Give it a read if you’re interested 🙂
Speaker background
- Expert in Communications and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)
- Founder of Imboorling, a company that provides training, workshops, and presentations for Personal growth
Speaker Intro
The speaker starts his speech talking about his background. As I mentioned in the previous section on Speaker background, he does a lot of stuff with his time. However, during this speech, he decides to only talk about the thing he does in his spare time. That is, being a football referee at KBVB. He states that there were two reasons that led him to get into a Part-time football referee job. One is to stay active and keep his body fit and healthy. Second, to learn how to not take things personally. He goes on to justify why he thought the referee job would help him learn that.
As a football referee, you have players from either team shouting, and swearing at you in the face all the time. Also, you piss off fans while making certain decisions. You hear mean stuff like, “Are you blind?”, “You are not fit for this job!!”, and even meaner things sometimes.
A person who is not good at handling comments like that, can take it quite personally and get pretty upset over it. The speaker says, he was able to learn how to not take things personally from his experiences and discusses two strategies that helped him.
Two strategies
- It’s not about ME – Empathize with others
Oftentimes, the reason we take things personally is that we think we had something to do with it or we make it about us.
For example, Let’s say you’ve had a hard day at work. You had been working on this project tirelessly for weeks and it has successfully come to an end. But your efforts go unnoticed and someone else gets credit for that or all you get is criticism about things that could have been better. You come home super pissed and start venting it out to your friend. But in the middle of the conversation, he/she stops paying attention to you and just goes looking for their phone. That frustrates you and makes you feel like the other person has no respect for you or takes you for granted.
But in this scenario, making a slight change in perspective would go a long way. Try looking at things from other people’s perspectives. In the above scenario, your friend could’ve received a very important message that he/she’s been waiting for. So, trying to empathize helps in avoiding overthinking.
- It’s about ME – Give yourself empathy
But sometimes, the above strategy won’t work out. And we might need to look into ourselves for answers.
For example, Let’s say someone yells at you, “You’re an Orange!”. No way that’s going to affect you. You’ll be like, “Is this person crazy?”. But if the same person says, “You’re so selfish!”, that hurts and you do take it personally. It’s only because you know there is some truth in it. You might not always take others’ concerns into account. There is a big chance it is rooted in your childhood. We can take things personally only if it touches a raw nerve.
So empathetic self-talk can be really helpful. If you don’t feel appreciated enough, talk to yourself “Maybe I’m longing so hard for recognition and I feel so sad if I don’t get it.”
But it doesn’t have to be always “shut up and blame it on ourselves”. You can stand up for yourself too. In the scenario discussed in the first strategy, if you know for sure that the person is just surfing the internet and doesn’t pay attention because of that, you can always say how you feel about it. For example, you can say something like, “I am sharing something that’s very important and you not paying attention, and just looking at your mobile is not nice “. By opening up, being vulnerable, but NOT COMPLAINING, you increase the chance that the other one will understand you and take your needs into account.
Outro
Putting these strategies into practice and getting good at them takes time. But if we could learn this skill of not taking things personally, wouldn’t that enhance our relationships enormously? We could create a better world. That would be great, right??
To conclude,
People may attack you, criticize you or ignore you, they can crumple you up with their words, spit you up, or walk all over you. But remember, no matter what they do or say,
YOU WILL ALWAYS KEEP YOUR VALUE