Don’t Take It Personally
“A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror.”
In the legal profession we can encounter a lot of bad behaviour. From colleagues, clients, opponents etc.
It can be a very stressful job and, on a few occasions, that stress can get the better of people, and they can erupt at work into shouting, blaming, bullying, condescending behaviour. Treating people like a punchbag.
One lesson I am continuing to remind myself of is not to take things personally. If someone is rude to me, it’s actually not about me at all. It’s all to do with the other person and the world they are currently inhabiting, which is presumably a less than optimal place judging by the fact that they are being rude to others. I wish I’d learned this earlier as it would have saved me years of getting wound up at work!
The instruction “don’t take anything personally” is of course, very easy to say and much more difficult to do in practice. Our “chimp brains” react emotionally to others’ actions at lightning-fast speed; our “thinking” brains are a lot slower. To overcome this, I think this message is one worth repeating to ourselves often.
“The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz is a short and helpful book in which the author sets out four “rules” which lead to personal freedom. The second rule, or agreement, is precisely this: don’t take anything personally. Ruiz makes the point that taking things personally is the maximum expression of selfishness as it presupposes that everything is all about you. He says that, in fact, nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. Even if someone seems to be personally targeting you, it's still not about you. That person is acting in such a way in accordance with their feelings, beliefs and opinions and programming.
At my law firm Gunnercooke’s away day in September, one of the speakers was Dr Rangan Chatterjee, well-known for his “Feel Better, Live More” podcast. Dr Chatterjee made a similar point, that by interpreting the actions of those around us, we effectively create our own reality.
He quoted the US psychologist and Holocaust survivor Edith Eger: “the greatest prison you’ll ever live is the one you create in your own mind.” He went on to say that we cannot ever know what causes people to behave the way they do, so we may as well assume that they are behaving that way for good reason. He said if we’d lived the other person’s life (for example, if we’d had their upbringing, their struggles, their work challenges etc), we would behave in exactly the same way they do.
A few years ago, someone I worked with behaved in a deeply unpleasant way towards me. Their actions caused me a lot of stress and upset at the time. But after the dust had settled, I knew that they’d been going through a tough time in their personal life which undoubtedly affected them deeply. I just happened to cross their path at a bad time.
Had I been following Dr Chatterjee’s advice, I wouldn’t have needed to know about the person’s specific difficulties; I would have assumed from the outset that their behaviour had nothing to do with me.
So here’s a reminder that when people behave badly at work, don’t take it personally! Don’t build a prison of negative thoughts in your own mind. Remember that you are not responsible for the actions of others – you are only responsible for you.
Have a great week.
Rachel