Don’t Make It Personal
On why nothing in life is truly ever personal.
We say “don’t take it personal” but might more accurately say “Don’t make it personal” because its a choice we make.
It is a choice, but most of us are unaware of our reactions and habits, so we react without thought and make things personal. The habit is ingrained in society and by proxy, the individuals conditioned by society. I wonder if it’s truly a choice for many. You can choose not to make things personal, but that attitude seems so far from the norm. Many might not even consider it an option because they’ve never known or been shown it could be one.
We’ve been explicitly and implicitly taught to react to all perceived slights, either through confronting another, or by confronting ourselves. “Perceived” is key, because we must first see it as an affront to our ego. So we must use energy to address it.Yet, we have limited energy and making things personal can waste it. .
We think of perceived slights as something we must protect ourselves from or retaliate against. It could be a mistake, with our insecurities interpreting something as an attack, only to realize we misread the situation. We could be correct and someone really was having a go at us. No matter which, we make it personal and feel we have to protect ourselves, by lashing out at the other person or ourselves. This means on some level we think this person has the power to hurt us.
But do they really? Or do we give them permission to do so? Why do other’s words and attitudes cause us to make things personal? Why do these interactions feel like danger we must react to? It’s because we were taught to look for outside validation rather than being taught to validate ourselves.
If you know someone is lying, why waste energy convincing someone you know the truth? We are taught to be insecure and unsure of our truth. Most are never taught to self validate or to explore and gain the self knowledge that allows them to not take things personally. Most don’t have boundaries between their own energy and energy originating outside them.
You must make things personal when you center your sense of self importance in all your interactions.You only think of your feelings and views, making it seem like the world revolves around you and your approval of its happenings.
Many make things personal to protect their fragile ego, their fragile sense of self importance that relies on outside validation. This is not to say they aren’t important because they are. This is a fact. They matter and no one can take that away from them. Unless they allow them to do so.
When you try to prove what you should know to be true, of course you will make things personal. If you know you’re important, there’s no need to be defensive. No words or actions of another can diminish your worth. So when we have a flimsy sense of self and believe we have to prove our worth, we’ll live with a chip on our shoulder, ready to react to anything we can construe as disrespect.
Do you need others to respect you if you respect yourself? If you have self love and respect, founded in self knowledge and belief, then you know others’ poor treatment of you is wrong and not an accurate representation of who you are. Using our limited energy and attention to do the impossible and force someone to acknowledge our importance, does this mean there is doubt about our worth in our heart? Does it mean we need validation from others to be happy?
It’s something, otherwise you could observe someone’s attempt to hurt you solely as an attempt. If you know they can’t diminish your worth, then you remain solid in your self love and respect. If you don’t need the validation of others, then you remain balanced, not reacting and getting high or low over what someone else says or does.
The fact is that everyone is important and the world doesn’t revolve around any 1 individual. When you make things personal, you’re saying that someone’s opinion is more important than your own. Their opinion trumped what you believed about yourself, such that you felt the need to react.
If someone said some wild shit like Bugs Bunny was real and was crossing the sky with a jetpack, you would react with disbelief. Or maybe you have such a chip on your shoulder that you’d make it personal and think “How dumb does this person think i am?”. But what sense does it make to take offense to another’s delusion? Why should you waste energy reacting to irrational statements?
I think the cause is the sense of self doubt society engrains in us. We don’t think we’re good enough or have proved enough, to be allowed to have unshakeable self confidence and self belief. We must be propped up by the opinion of others and react negatively when we perceive disagreement, because it takes away from our sense of self. We’ve always decided who we are based on what others have said about us.
Sometimes we will need to address disrespect, but even then, there’s no need to make things personal. If we decide it’s worth addressing, then we are free to do so. Not to change the other person, because only they can do that, but to freely express ourselves. Our human feelings are important as well. But we must acknowledge that reacting from a hurt ego, differs from intentionally choosing to address something because we believe it’s the right thing to do.
We don’t choose our reactions, our nervous system chooses for us. Like our hand recoiling from a hot stove , some things are deeply ingrained in us and happen automatically, without thought. Making things personal is a habitual reaction many undergo in the moment. Then, with time and space afterwards, we consider our reaction to be a mistake and regret it, knowing we wasted our energy.
Life is akin to sports. When you have time and space it’s easier to make better decisions because you have time to think. But when the pressure is on, your reactions take over and you act unconsciously based on what habits are ingrained in your nervous system, for better or worse. Your nervous system encompasses the body and mind and will show the results of your training, or lack thereof. So when we notice ourselves constantly making things personal, reacting poorly, losing our sense of self, making mistakes, aka losing the ball, we know that with training we can improve ourselves and make better decisions.
Training the mind to not react by making things personal means training our perspective. Opening our mind and seeing more of the field/life, means we can put ourselves in a better position. We can give ourselves more time and space in as many situations as possible to help poor decision making. This means seeing things differently than we did in the past. This means keeping ourselves away from toxic situations and people who hamper our decision making.
Inevitably, we will come under pressure during the game of life. We won’t have much time or space but will still want to make beneficial decisions. This is where the ability to relax makes a big difference. When you’re tense, your nervous system won’t work correctly. Even if you know what to do and have done it in training tons of times, when you create pressure in your mind, you can’t access your training. You’ll revert to bad habits.
If we believe the way others treat us is based on their experiences, then we believe nothing should be made personal. Unique human experiences are why different people approach similar situations differently. With this in mind, we are more likely to remain calm when we know someone is having a go at us or pressing us. But when doubt creeps in as pressure builds, we lose our philosophy and revert to protecting ourselves, feeling we’re in danger.
You can be under attack and not feel in danger. It depends on your level of confidence, as well what you’re focused on. Are you focused on protecting yourself because you feel threatened, or focused on playing the right way? Whatever “the right way” means to you. Our energy is limited. We invest it in whatever we give attention to. Is our attention on protecting or accomplishing?
To be cool under pressure, we must engrain good habits through training our mind and body. Such that we embody philosophies we intellectually agree with. Will the bad habits of taking things personally occasionally show up when under pressure? Undoubtedly, but when you notice, you think of why you felt pressured and why your bad habits surfaced. You accept it and you learn from it. It’s hard to even call it a mistake if you learned from it.
As you continue to learn and train, the mistakes happen less. That philosophy will become ingrained in your nervous system on increasingly deeper levels and you’ll remain calm in situations that used to feel like high pressure. The game will slow down for you. Your mind will not only see time and space where it couldn’t imagine it before, but your reactions will begin to be more beneficial. You’ll start to react in ways that put you in better positions to play the game of life.
In the past you might have reacted by taking things personally and lashed out. But now, with the belief nothing is personal and how you’re treated has everything to do with the other person’s perspective, when someone treats you harshly, you know something is going on internally with them. You don’t accept their invitation to compete. You either leave the situation, physically or mentally, or ask compassionate questions to help them get to the root cause of their feelings. Because their treatment of you was obviously a symptom of a deeper issue.
We don’t have to react and we don’t have to make things personal. Humans can witness themselves, and change themselves based on what they think is right. We can mold ourselves into who we want to be, once we become aware of who we are. So many of us don’t know who we truly are and in turn, don’t know who we could truly be.
That’s why we make things personal. We turn every interaction into a referendum on our sense of self. We’ve never taken the time to know ourselves. We don’t think we’re allowed to validate ourselves, therefore other’s opinions become the foundation upon which we build our idea of who we are.
Given that we don’t control others’ opinions, what a flimsy, unstable, self-defeating foundation to build on. We deserve much more than to give away our power to build ourselves. We deserve to understand ourselves and our power, and to create a stable sense of self we can build ourselves on. That’s the only way we can reach the heights available for us.
The opinions of others are too situational, continually shifting. They are factors outside our control, based on factors outside our control. Judging ourselves based on what others say, aka taking things personally, leads to a situation that’s exponentially fucked.
Don’t let someone else’s perspective become the way you measure yourself. That shit has nothing to do with you. It only appears that way because you happen to be there at the time. If another person had replaced you in that situation, they’d act the same way, because their decision has everything to do with them.
We overrate our ability to influence people. We influence situations with our decisions, but just as we make decisions based on our past human experience and how we feel, so do others. A conscious human believes they always have a choice. Influencing a situation does not mean we control someone else’s choices that result from their life to that point.
So truly, even if it appears so, nothing in life is ever personal. For it to be personal, we have to make it that way. We have to choose to give our power away and compete with someone else’s opinion. One we have no control over and has everything to do with their perspective based on their own past experiences.