How I Am Learning To Stop Taking Things Personally
I must have heard the phrase, “don’t take it personally” for a long while before it started to get to me. I always wonder how people expect me not to react to some things that people do or say to me that just don’t cut it. However, gradually I began to realize that there is so much peace in not taking things personally. Before now, if anyone says anything to me that I don’t think the person should have said, I try to overanalyze it as much as possible so as not to allow any jibe pass by. I mean, I would try as much as possible to fish out the presumed “hidden motives”, just to be sure that the person isn’t insulting me.
Like you might have guessed, this was stressful. Too stressful and time-wasting. The energy that I would have channeled to something more productive was channeled to things that weren’t important.
It was stressful, I tell you.
Once I learned what I was doing wrong and I was willing to change for the better, I started feeling better.
First, what does taking things personally mean? In my own terms, I believe taking things too personally means allowing every little thing and things that aren’t really what they seem to be to get to me or offend me.
In fact, I realized that most of these things were just figments of my imaginations! Most of the time when I took things personally, the other person might not have meant what I thought he or she meant.
If you think you take things too personally, and you want to stop, here are some things to consider:
- Don’t allow your feelings dictate your emotions: this is one of the things I have come to learn over time. If you allow your feelings dictate your actions, you might not be acting the way you should. Step back and rethink the situation, are you acting the way you ought to act or is it based on how you are feeling?
- What is the other person’s intention: sometimes it might be difficult to find out what the other person’s intention is, but one of the ways to easily get this is to truthfully think about it, feelings aside.
- Is this relevant? In the past, I have allowed myself to get angry or upset over things that aren’t relevant. Some of those things might not even be relevant in the next one week, or I might forget about it the next day. However, this doesn’t mean we should allow things that are more important get to us, what I’m trying to say here is that most of the times what people take personally are things that aren’t relevant.
- Is this the best way to solve this? This is another question that has been very useful to me. Sometimes when you are faced with a misunderstanding with someone and if you are tempted to flare up; one of the things you can ask yourself is this – “is the best way to solve this issue or situation?’ if you can take out the time to ask yourself this question is such situations, you might handle such situations better. Once I thought about this question, so many options flash across my face; e.g. apologize and move on, talk it out, talk about your anger, pause and not respond in an anger, etc.
How do you avoid taking things personally? Care to share with us?
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