I received a question from one of you about when allowing others to express their frustrations/anger/venting, how do you avoid taking it personally.
To stop taking things personally, you must know that you are inherently good – that there is nothing about you that is wrong or bad – that you’ve made mistakes because you are human and learning daily. You must know that you can dissolve your own errors by seeing yourself with compassion and admitting to the truth of a situation. Once you feel this care for yourself, is when you’re secure enough to hear someone and know that they aren’t trying to put you down. Instead what happens is you see it’s not about you. You see that you are making their words mean something more than they do; that you aren’t being honest with yourself, because you’re creating a story in your mind, which isn’t true. You want to ask yourself what do I know to be true? And what you know is only that the person has said something. Then it’s your choice to attach meaning to it or not.
Also, what you begin to see, is that the other person is hurting, feeling discomfort, and they are sharing this with you. That they are suffering in some way. They aren’t trying to make you feel badly, they’re feeling badly. So it becomes your role to listen to their expression to see if you can be helpful to them.
There are different practices you can use to protect your energy during a conversation so that you don’t take what the other person is saying too personally. Here are a handful and you’ll want to see what suits you best.
If you know there’s a person who has this affect on you then before you see them you’ll want to
- visualize yourself within a bubble. Knowing that someone can say something, but the bubble is your protective barrier.
- see yourself as a racquetball wall. And so whatever the other person says is going to easily bounce off of you.
- start to notice you’re taking something personally and envision a pair of scissors and cutting the attachment to the language.
- see yourself as a faucet and you open the attachment that lets the words flow in and out.
- imagine you’re surrounded by sun panels and they are facing outward. When the words come toward you, they’re reflected back out so you don’t absorb them.
Start to practice this and let me know how it goes!
Your words are valuable and what you have to say is necessary
XX
Cynthia
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