Practice “Don’t Take Things Personally”

We usually face “negative” actions by other people — the actions we dislike — as if they were actions specifically made to hurt us.

If we think this way, we will feel the need to react and to defend ourselves when those situations happen, because our ego feels threatened in their beliefs and way of acting.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can learn to handle better stressful situations and for that to happen all that is required is to adopt a different attitude.

If we practice not taking things personally, we will stop thinking that those actions’ objective is hurting us. We will adopt a much more positive way of dealing with unpleasant situations.

“Don't take anything Personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering” .

― Don Miguel Ruiz

Adopting this new perspective, we will obtain many benefits:

• we will stop having a reactive posture to these situations,
• we will save the energy we waste on those reactions,
• and we will decrease the levels of stress those situations cause us.

We will also access a level that is much closer to reality and facts.

Usually, people do not act in a specific way with us, they just reproduce with us the same behaviors they also assume with other people.

For this very reason, their actions are not, in most cases, carefully planned to hurt us — although our ego tries to make us think that to find reasons to feed more reactive thoughts.

“You can never take anything personally. Just a story. It’s not their fault they want to kick you and it’s certainly not yours. It’s just the way things are. Sometimes you need to hear the worst, so you have no fear in what you do and learn to work around the what-have-you.”

― Initially NO, Percipience: Outside the Range of Understood Sense

How many times, when we shared that someone has done or said something wrong to us, we will hear: “that person does it with everyone, he did the same thing to another person I know a few days ago”.

Instead of using this information to increase our antagonism and hate towards that person, we can analyze it objectively and conclude that is not an activity designed to harm us. It is just an expression of that person’s state of consciousness.

We should also keep in mind that often these people may be experiencing problems that we don’t know about, problems that may affect their behavior in ways they (and we) don’t even realize.

And it doesn’t have to be serious problems. How many times, just because we did not sleep well last night or because we had a slight setback, we end up saying something unpleasant even to the people we love the most?

Even if the person that is usually unpleasant with us doesn’t evolve, we can always evolve ourselves. We must not use their behavior as a reason for not doing better.

We may not be able to change how others behave — but we can change how we react to them, that is always in our power.

If we adopt a more calm attitude and analyze the situations with some perspective, we can reduce the stressful situations we face every day. And that is a major improvement, and an essential step on our path to a more meaningful life.

How we react depends only on us. We can make the change.