How to NOT Take Things Personally

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The three essentials for high performance are neuro-regulation (to get and stay calm), clear the negative self-talk and the beliefs that create them (including imposter syndrome), and create new success habits.

This week we're looking how taking things personally impacts you and your leadership.

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It’s Not Personal – Or Is it?

If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you

This is the first line from Rudyard Kipling’s classic poem ‘If’ which gives great guidance for high-performance leadership. When a crisis strikes, urgency is extreme and challenges loom, what scuppers many great leadership intentions is taking things personally.

Whether a comment is veiled criticism, a simple difference of opinion, or a direct personal attack, when you take things personally it can make you lose your head. You lose your calm, your balance and your clear thinking.

Three Reactions

When you take things personally, you automatically react to them. Typically, you might feel offended, defensive or cowed. All three are emotional punches that can knock you down, and change how you respond to the situation. Rarely is that response helpful, either!

1. Offended

If you feel offended or insulted by the comment, the underlying feeling is one of hurt. You are not being seen for your good intentions. Your values are being misjudged or misinterpreted. You are not feeling respected for your knowledge, experience or views. The comment feels like an attack on your worth, and so it feels extremely personal.

2. Defensive

If you automatically jump to a defensive reaction, the underlying feeling is anger. Your nervous system has been triggered into the fight state, and you may lash out with barbed comments of your own.? Your tone may be sarcastic, intimidating or aggressive. You are responding to an attack that feels so personal that it threatens your sense of safety.

3. Cowed

If you feel cowed, intimidated or overwhelmed by the comment, then your underlying feeling is fear. Again your nervous system is triggered, this time to flight or freeze states. It’s common to also buy into the criticism, taking it as true, and creating a feeling of self-doubt. The blame feels very personal, and uncomfortable because part of you believes it.

You may feel just one of these reactions, two of them or all three. They often lead to regret and self-criticism because your reaction was unintentional.

Automatic

You don’t plan to be offended, you don’t intend to get defensive and you certainly don’t want to feel self-doubt.

Taking things personally is tricky because these three reactions to criticism are automatic. They are patterns of behaviour that sidestep your normal thinking and evaluation. They are an automatic protective behaviour, and so you react before your thinking brain has even had a chance to evaluate the situation.

This reaction comes from the survival-focused part of your brain that automatically jumps to protect you when you come across a threat – like a tiger or snake on your path.?

It is normal, natural and beneficial when there is a genuine threat.

But it is less than helpful when that threat isn’t real.

Some leadership books simply say ‘Don’t take things so personally.’

Great advice … but how?

Not Not-Caring

The solution to not taking things so personally is not to swing in the opposite direction and stop caring. It is not to throw out every opinion that contradicts your own.

Every critical comment, whether intended or not, has two components. It has the ‘attack’ part that your brain is so quick to respond to. Yet it can also have a genuine message, real feedback or a new perspective to consider.

Not taking things personally starts with learning how to separate these two.

The Message

This is easier to do after the fact when you’ve had time to cool down and consider it.

Ask yourself, if this had been said in a kind, respectful manner, what might the message have been?

This is the first useful filter; to extract any potential value from the comment and leave behind the offensive part.

Now, how do you handle the offensive or attacking part?

Their Reactions

Thinking about the person who made the comment. Could they have been acting from feelings of being offended, defensive or cowed themselves? Are you, in fact, reacting to someone else’s reaction?

This is more common than you might think, and a common way for arguments to start and escalate.

If it is their reactions, then you can understand that they too are acting from an automatic protective mechanism – i.e. it may well have not been their intention to offend or attack.

When you consider this, then it is easier to take it less personally. Because it was more about their automatic reactions than it was about you.

Intentional Attack

Sometimes, a critical attack is a deliberate ploy rather than a defensive reaction.

How do you not take that personally?

Here the other person is using attack as a strategy to try and get the outcome they want. And they make it sound personal because that does sometimes work. It’s an unproductive and harmful strategy, and it burns bridges rather than building them.

If you can see that this is simply their clumsy attempt to get what they want, then you can also see that it is NOT personal. They would use this if another person were in your place, so it is not about you at all. Consider that, and you can start to relax and let it go.

Difference of Opinion

Some people do not have great communication skills, and they may express a difference of opinion in a way that is attacking. Here the attack is unintentional. If you can spot that the problem is their communication skills, then again you can not take it personally, as it is not about you.

Sometimes you can feel attacked by someone expressing a different perspective to yours. You can perceive this as a threat, especially if you have ‘knowledge perfectionism’ i.e. you feel a need to be right.

In this case, someone suggesting you’re wrong can feel like an attack. In this case, the deeper work is to address your knowledge perfectionism, otherwise, it will always trigger an automatic defensive reaction in you.

Freedom

When you can separate the message from the criticism, and then let go of the emotional punch it can feel like, then you are free. Your ability to not take things personally means that you will keep your head when all around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.

Rudyard Kipling’s IF poem was written around 1895, so let’s bring it up to date with an inclusive, modern summary …

IF you can not take things personally ... then you will be a great leader, my friend.

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What I've loved this week:

Clear Thinking by Shane Parrish

Clear Thinking is a great book to help you examine your priorities, to make sure that you get to lead the life that you want, and high performance easier rather than hard.

He states that your calendar will reveal your true priorities, regardless of what you say. Look at where you’re actually spending your time and energy. It is an interesting exercise to go through and certainly has made me think a little more about my time.

It does assume that all time/energy is equal, however. Life is a little more complicated than that, but you already knew that!

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An action step you can do this week …

The steps to not taking things personally are covered above. The very first step to explore this week is your awareness. When and where do you take things personally? What is your habitual response to criticism or attack?

Take this growing awareness as pure information, and in no way a judgement of you and your reactions. From here, the skill of not taking things personally is much easier to develop.

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We'll cover more on high-performance leadership in future issues.

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I'm Dr Tara Halliday, specialist Imposter Syndrome Coach and best-selling author.

The skill of not taking things personally and the ability to separate the emotion from the message are two natural consequences of developing your unconditional worth. Which also eliminates imposter syndrome! These are consistent results that my clients enjoy from my Inner Success programme.

For more information about this deep transformational programme, book a quick 15-minute call with me.

Click here to book: https://bit.ly/callTara

Have an excellent, refreshing and recharging weekend and a very Happy New Year!

Tara

P.S. Thank you for reading to the end of the newsletter, I appreciate your interest and attention!

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