This Can Affect Me Without Being About Me

One of the hardest things to learn, both personally and professionally, is how not to take everything personally.

And I don't mean becoming detached.

I don't mean pretending things don't hurt.

I mean learning to recognize that something can affect you personally without actually being about you personally.

That distinction has become increasingly interesting to me through my work with leaders, employees, and teams.

When something hurts, we naturally make it about us

Someone doesn't get the promotion they wanted.

Their role changes.

A decision is made that they strongly disagree with.

They receive difficult feedback.

Their employment ends.

A colleague behaves differently than they expected.

And very quickly, our brains can start filling in the blanks:

They don't value me.

They're doing this to me.

After everything I've done for them...

How could they treat me this way?

It's human.

Of course it is.

When something affects us, we want to understand why.

And when we don't have the full picture, we often create one.

But the story we tell ourselves isn't necessarily the truth.

“This hurts me” isn't the same as “this was done to hurt me.”

This is the distinction I keep coming back to.

This hurts me.

And:

This was done to hurt me.

Those are two very different statements.

You can be disappointed by someone's decision without that decision being a personal attack.

You can disagree with how something was handled without deciding that the other person doesn't respect you.

You can be hurt by a change without believing that someone wanted to hurt you.

And you can even acknowledge that someone made a bad decision without allowing that decision to become part of your identity.

That takes practice.

It requires enough confidence in yourself to sit with discomfort without immediately turning it into a story about your worth.

Two things can be true at once

This becomes especially important in leadership.

Sometimes leaders have to make decisions that are genuinely difficult for an individual employee.

A decision may be necessary for the health of the business.

It may be financially responsible.

It may be about restructuring a role, changing direction, addressing performance, or making a difficult people decision.

And it may still hurt someone.

That doesn't automatically make the leader cruel.

And it doesn't automatically mean the employee is wrong.

Two things can be true at once.

The decision can be necessary.

And it can be painful.

The person making the decision can care deeply.

And the person receiving it can still feel hurt.

There doesn't always have to be a villain.

Confidence changes how we respond

I think this is where confidence comes in.

When you stop over-identifying with every decision someone else makes, you become much harder to knock off centre.

You can say:

I disagree with this.

I wish they had handled it differently.

I'm disappointed.

This hurt.

And also:

This doesn't define my value.

That's a very different place to respond from.

You still get to have feelings.

You still get to be angry.

You still get to question decisions.

You still get to decide that something wasn't handled well.

The goal isn't to become someone who doesn't care.

The goal is to feel it without letting it become your entire story.

A useful question

The next time something happens that feels personal, maybe the question isn't:

“Why are they doing this to me?”

Maybe it's:

“This is affecting me. But is it actually about me?” and "What can I do for myself, now?" or even "What is there to learn from this?"

Sometimes the answer will be yes.

Sometimes it won't.

And sometimes you won't know.

But creating that little bit of space between what happened and the story we create around it can change how we respond.

It gives us room to stay curious.

To stay grounded.

To make better decisions.

To preserve relationships that might otherwise become casualties of our assumptions.

And, especially for leaders, it gives us a better chance of having difficult conversations without making them more personal than they need to be.

Because not everything that happens around us is a reflection of us.

And not every difficult thing requires someone to be the villain.

Sometimes something can affect you deeply without actually being about you at all.