Your Courageous Life

not taking it personally

“Don’t take it personally.”

“It’s none of my business what anyone else thinks of me.”

“Don’t give your power away to what other people think.”

I’d hear these things, and I’d think: Yeah. But HOW?

I wrote here about how I gave power away to what people think, how this was my kryptonite, and it was an issue that I continued to turn over and play with. Turn over, turn over, turn over.

And then, the A-ha moment came. Jesus Christmas! Finally!

It started when a project that I was working on was met with feedback couched in anger directed at my pretty little head. I kept wanting to call it “being really mean.” My Coach kept encouraging me to call that feedback “that person’s experience.”  I kept arguing with him in my head after the session was over: Dude, quit playing semantics–the feedback was mean. If I told you that I had said those things to someone, you’d be all, “Kate, let’s have a talk about integrity.” But someone else does it to me? And you’re all, “that’s just their experience”? Ex-CUSE me?

Yet I knew that he was choosing the more powerful position–the feedback, even the anger, was not about me. It was about that person and the experience they were choosing to have. Why make it about me? Ah, Matthew. My coach, my guru. (He loves it when I call him that).

Then I got into a heavy-duty moving session of process work in which I went in with one goal: I knew I was holding some long-standing resentments, like years-long, towards someone, and I wanted to let them go. So I plopped myself down and prayed and cried and hit things (to a great musical soundtrack) until, as often happens after crying, a nice wave of clarity came over me and I “got it.” What came out of that session was realizing that the things that had happened in those relationships were not personal. It was never personal. It just wasn’t a match. That was okay.

And, in fact, something else took hold of me: People get to have the experience they choose to have. That includes me. That includes you. That includes your mother, the cashier at the store, the neighbor down the street and that dude who just cut you off in traffic.

I began playing with this phrase: People get to choose to have the experience they want to have.

The more I played, the more I liked: Yes! Yes! People get to choose the experience they want to have!

Getting here has been one of those experiences in life where something just got too painful to hold on to. Here was my project, my baby, this thing I was excited about, and I’d felt as if it was punched. Some synapses connected and I “got it”: It is too painful to live that way, any more.

It became clear: If someone does not like the project that I worked on, they choose that experience of not liking me or the project. They choose their level of involvement, how much they will try to effect change, or if they will choose to complain. They choose whether or not they will give me feedback at a point where I can actually respond, or if they’ll wait until things are done and then be pissed and resentful because there’s no way to go back and change it (talk about sabotage!).

People choose the experience they will have of me. I know that I walk the world human. I want connection and love, that’s my desire, and I’m going to fall short of that at times. Will someone choose to have the experience of “Kate is loving at heart and imperfect” or will someone choose to have the experience of “Kate is the sum total of her mistakes”? They get to choose. I don’t need to play any part in their choices, their orchestration of their lives.

And–to bring it back to personal responsibility–I choose the experience I have of other people! How often have I made assumptions about people because of one bad experience? I get to choose to have an experience of stepping into my vision for my life, or of just reducing myself to negative judgements. If someone cuts me off in traffic, I get to choose whether or not I’m going to invest energy into being annoyed, judging that person, getting irritated, or taking on a belief system that “people are so inconsiderate!”

All of the statements I made at first: Don’t take it personally, etc., are all statements that essentially mean the same thing as what I’m writing now. For some reason, this statement: “People get to choose the experience they want to have” rings most true.

It feels like freedom.

Where do you notice yourself taking things personally the most?