Don't take it personally

Just the other morning as I was driving my daughter to school, I went into overwhelm. I had a roof leak in my home. It was raining and the visibility was poor. The puppy was chewing on something in the back seat he shouldn’t be. There was some awful news on the radio and my daughter was chanting at the top of her lungs.

“Quiet,” I screamed. I took a deep breath, turned off the radio; hollered at the puppy and put my attention back on driving. When I looked back at my daughter in the mirror, she was now upset and sulking. “I’m sorry I screamed, Honey. There was just too much going on. It’s not about you. It’s not personal.”

It’s not personal. I thought about that phrase for a while. In a younger and much more dramatic time of my life, I used to take everything personally. If I felt a woman had scorned me, I would go sulk, much like my daughter was doing now. If someone had scratched my car opening their car door in a parking lot, I would go ballistic. “How could you do that to me?”

I was once a bank teller. One day a customer came in angry about something that the bank had done, and I got upset. I was sure that they were angry at me and not simply at the error the bank had made. This was the way I lived my life. Everything was very personal.

Somewhere in my thirties, I discovered life wasn’t as personal as I thought it was. For example, I started to realize that if someone had almost caused an accident and crashed into my car, they weren’t out to get me. They just did something thoughtless or stupid and I happened to be there. I took a job as a customer service representative and did pretty well at calming people down. After all if they were screaming in the phone, it wasn’t just at me. If I handed the phone to another rep the customer would still be screaming.

I even noticed that my wife would do things that I didn’t like, but she wasn’t doing them just to annoy me. There was no malicious aforethought. She wasn’t out to get me. She was just doing whatever she was doing and I didn’t agree.

Life is a personal experience, just don’t take it personally. I don’t mean to be flippant, but that seemingly paradoxical statement can be very important in how you live your life. There is a distinction between the events in your life and how you let them affect you. If you can become skilled at recognizing the difference between these two concepts it can be very liberating and powerful.

This seems so simple, but many of us still take things too personally. If you a super-sensitive person you are probably taking this article far too seriously. Lighten up! It’s not all about you.

It is very useful to be able to be a little bit detached. Here are some things that you can do.
Realize that the vast majority of the time the other person is not out to get you.
Remember that the other person sees the situation from their own perspective.
Understand that the other person would probably be acting the same way even if you weren’t there.

This is true of politics too. However you disagree with people, don’t take it personally.