Personally

It can be really easy to take something personal. We go about our lives caring mostly about what’s immediately in front of us, about the things going on with those we care about most, and then lastly, those we associate with.

As such, we don’t always get to know everyone very well. We have coworkers we see for 8 or so hours a day, or friends we see in a blue moon.

We react impulsively to everything we interact with. We feel like life brought something immediately in front of us because it wants to poke and prod at us like we are cattle. That person is complaining about something you worked on because they have placed a target on your forhead. This happened because you walked into the room and you never really liked that person to begin with.

It’s very easy to take things personally as we are very personal beings. We do nice things for those we care about and hope that they do nice things in return, so we transitively say those who do wrong by us are against us.

It happens to everyone, and it usually turns a conversation into an argument where we try to out-talk and out-reason everyone around us.

The end-game is the same, everyone frustrated, bothered, and exhausted, left in no way better than before the storm.

I think we also take things personally because we feel the urge to defend ourselves. Whenever we feel like our castle is under attack, we need to get both defensive and if that’s not working, get offensive.

It can be very hard to just say the words ‘I was wrong’ ‘Sorry’ ‘I am wrong’ or any of the other phrases that tries to reframe the situation.

Sometimes we want to easily say those words but those around us are so far on the offense, that the words fall on deaf ears.

Nobody is perfect, and life leaves many gaps for us to fill in. It’s interesting when we find it easier to assume everyone else is wrong and that we are 100% correct.

I try to be as compensating as possible in most situations, but that doesn’t always happen.

Assumptions place us down the path we never understood without asking for directions. Even the most cautious of path finding people find themselves making the wrong assumptions. The best we can do is to try to recognize as soon as we can and try to get onto the right path.

We need to think about taking less things personally and instead taking the time to find out the way to the right path forward.