1.We take things too personally.
No one is out to attack us.
Are there people that are filled with negativity and lash out? Of course. What we need to all realise, however, is that even those instances are not personal.
Anytime you receive a strong message, a negative comment, or a negative review, you have the choice to never take that personally. In these instances, there are two options…
From a growth perspective, the individual with the negative feedback may have a great point that you hadn't realised, and you can take ownership of that and use it as fuel to power growth. Or…
You can take it personally and reciprocate that hostile energy.
I’m sure you’ve guessed…
The first is way more productive.
Remember: We lack context.
We have no clue what the person on the other side of that phone, computer, or sitting right across from us is going through.
Leaning into empathy can, therefore, be a really productive path.
Think about this.
If someone is taking time out of their day to send you a nasty message, write an extremely aggressive comment below your photo, or get in your face, imagine what situations they must be in to act that way. Imagine what they must be going through.
Now, that certainly doesn't excuse their behaviour. However, realising that we lack an understanding of the things that sit behind their curtain can open our minds to a world filled with empathy, rather than lashing back out and burning our energy.
The moment we take things too personally is the moment we turn to defence.
Defending ourselves, rather than focusing on growing, only stops you from moving forward, whereas playing offence allows us to make progress. When we understand this equation, we start to open our minds to a world where we can easily move past these non-progressive events.
Too often, people react to their emotions rather than thinking logically. We need to learn to use our emotions to think, not to think with our emotions. Not everyone is ill-intended when interacting with us — providing feedback, critiquing our work, etc. — but when we perceive the world as such, we create a filter so fine, nothing can get through. This means good or bad.
Don't block out the truth just because you don't like the answer. Growth comes from being vulnerable and keeping an open mind. If we can learn to take information in for what it is — feedback, suggestions, ideas — we allow ourselves to double our knowledge.
Taking things too personally is a sure way to shut ourselves off from the world.
Think about how limiting this can be.
Think about all the things that we miss, all because we take things too personally.
We all need to dedicate time to self-examination, asking ourselves questions like:
“Am I taking this too personally?”
“Can this information make me a better person?”
“Can this information be of value to me?”
Taking these moments to pause between receiving information, processing it, and reacting to it, can be a game-changer.
2. We care more about what other people think than about what we think, and it's destroying our confidence.
The moment the outside world becomes more valuable than our internal world, is the moment we start living life to please others.
We can be so quick to trade our internal happiness in order to please others, do what we think others think we should be doing, make others happy rather than ourselves, and/or to fit in.
All of these actions come at a very high price.
Here’s the irony with all of this: all of those people that we are trying to please, that crowd we are trying to fit into, they are struggling with the same exact thing. They’re also struggling with conforming to what the outside world wants, rather than their internal needs.
So here we are, sacrificing our happiness and trading it in to please the people that are sacrificing the same exact things. This sacrifice happens at an alarming rate, and people are willing to over-leverage themselves just to please others.
Buying into what we ultimately know will not drive our happiness is a great example of this. The average person spends $18,000/year on non-essentials, but only $3,600/year on personal development. This really highlights how most people's priorities need to shift.
We all deserve better.
We all deserve to live the life that we truly want.
Here’s another ironic piece to this thinking that we create in our minds: we are making assumptions.
We are making assumptions as to what others think, and, 9 times out of 10, we are probably incredibly far off from what people are actually thinking. We sometimes even assume that they are even judging or looking at these particular things that we are doing in the first place, over-analysing our every move.
Be honest with yourself, now.
For every person that you walk by on the street, in the park, on the bus, or even at work, how many things do you think are going on in their life?
A lot.
They have their own life to focus on, just like you or me. They have their own projects, family, careers, business, friends, relationships, and even traumas. To think that those around us have the time to over-analyse and judge our lives or actions to the point we do in our own minds, is actually crazy.
What if...These are fabrications?
These are our minds making these assumptions.
So, if this really isn't happening, and even if it actually was, why make it into a big deal? Why allow yourself to put your life on hold, or pivot over these things? In actuality, this is how we are judging ourselves, holding ourselves to this standard and over-analysing our every move.
Of course, there is absolutely a large portion of people that are making decisions in favour of what other people think, rather than themselves. Most of the time, however, other people are not worried or spending the time being as critical as you assume. This is our internal gears fabricating these things.
Remember: How we speak to ourselves internally is how we treat ourselves externally.
Noise is either created inside our heads, or from outside. Make sure to focus on the right voice. ‘Normal’ is subjective, so focus on your unique traits, as this is what makes you, ‘you’.
Focus on your contributions, rather than your shortcomings. Make a conscious decision to live your life in alignment with your values, your goals, your dreams, and your ethics.
3. We avoid dealing with our emotional issues, despite knowing that they cause problems.
Emotions are natural.
We all have them, therefore we all experience them. Avoiding them only sweeps them under the rug, just for them to later be tripped over. This behaviour is exactly that ‘short-term trade for long-term exhaustion’.
The equivalent is cleaning the house on the weekend — you get upset that it takes an hour to clean up everything, but if you took 10 minutes cleaning up each day during the week, you wouldn't need to burn the time on the weekend.
Ignoring these natural signals only does more harm than good.
You are not ‘different’ or ‘less than’ because you have emotions. You are not ‘different’ or ‘less than’ because you’ve faced past emotional trauma.
You are human.
You are capable, and you are worthy.
Not facing these emotions/traumas will only create a scarier monster down the road. However, as a society, we are not taught how to deal with these emotions, and not addressing them turns into suppression with things, potentially, like alcohol, using drugs, vegging out in front of the TV, etc.
All of this creates a behaviour similar to us pressing the accelerator in our car and breaking at the same time — eventually something will give. Either the brakes will, or the tires will blow out.
This creates a dangerous environment where we become ruled by our emotions in an unhealthy way, and this usually happens without any awareness that it's happening.
The best thing anyone can do is spend time truly getting to know themselves, specifically our pasts, and understanding why we do certain things the way we do, or why we look at things the way we do.
We become so fixated on looking outward, that we forget to look inward. Most people do not know themselves, and most people fear facing that, or facing their past. Truthfully, though, most of our answers sit in those dark alleys, collecting dust.
Yes, facing these emotions can be scary, but they are not life-ending. In fact, that is where our life begins. That is when we start living, and stop hiding.
Only you can influence the change you want in your life.
4. We make ourselves suffer by sticking with what's known, because we are terrified of uncertainty.
This plays a huge factor in our success and our ability to grow.
Many of us live in the confines of this safe circle we’ve built. This safety enables us to be comfortable today, throwing any concerns out the window for our future selves.
Those things that are tossed out the window, though, are not biodegradable. They keep stacking up on the side of the road, and eventually, they completely block it, making it increasingly difficult to cross to the other side.
In the end, in 10-15 years, we wonder…
“What was down that road?”
“I wonder what the views looked like…”
To spend our lives living in fear, never exploring our dreams, is cruel.
Most play to not lose, when they need to be playing to win.
Life breaks down into two roads during these moments:
The one we’re on now, the ‘steady ahead’, or..
The one that we ultimately know leads to new views, meeting new people, learning new things, and creating the life that we want.
This fear of uncertainty is chewing away at us more than we think. When we sit and pontificate about how things ‘may or may not’ turn out, we just put ourselves through a gauntlet of emotions.
Because the things we think of in our head are usually way over-the-top from what reality looks like — and normally not in a positive way — our minds are usually thinking of the worst-case scenario.
Meanwhile, we could be taking action to see what truly happens, and, if things don't go as planned, it's an opportunity to adjust.
These opportunities of direct feedback are how we accelerate, and this acceleration is compounded, meaning the more looks that we give ourselves, the more information we have to go off of to make better decisions.
The cost of not trying something new, of not taking risks, is more than you think.
Each missed opportunity is more information that we are missing in order to grow.
Risk is simply the price we pay for opportunity.
Let failure inspire you — let it provide inspiration to be better, practice harder, and learn more. When stuck on these decisions and in this rut of taking action towards uncertainty, remember: we can’t figure out what we’re worth unless we know what we’re capable of doing.
We have to believe in ourselves more than anyone else. No one can believe in you more than you, so if you’re stopping at the gates of a decision, no one is going to open them for you. No one is going to kick you through.
That is up for us to do for ourselves.
It is up to us to grab that handle of that decision’s door with confidence, turn it, and push it in. We have to believe that even though we don't know what sits behind that door, we can handle it, and we will come out the other side a better person.
If we can do those things, if we can believe in ourselves, we will be fine. We will be better for it.
We need to remind ourselves daily to think big. By having small thoughts, we create small outcomes. Therefore, by having big thoughts we create big outcomes.
It’s not about being the smartest, as being the boldest will get you ahead.
𝗕𝗢𝗢𝗞 a complimentary 45 minute 𝗘𝗠𝗢𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗔𝗟 𝗙𝗥𝗘𝗘𝗗𝗢𝗠 𝗕𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗧𝗛𝗥𝗢𝗨𝗚𝗛 𝗖𝗔𝗟𝗟 with me to find out how to create boundaries and live life from your power.
♥️
Ｃａｔｈｅｒｉｎｅ
ABOUT THE AUTHOR & COACH
Catherine is a heart-centred wellness therapist, transformational coach, intuitive counsellor and mindfulness facilitator who specialises in helping you create calm confidence, nourish your self esteem and self-love, build healthy boundaries, ditch perfectionism and people-pleasing, and get out of your own way to achieve the life you deserve.
She offers her wise words, actions, and guidance to help people connect positively with their body, mind and soul.
Her sessions provide you with real-life the support and the readily accessible mindset tools you need to achieve this.
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