Last year, my good friend Nicole recommended I read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz. It’s this fabulous book that helps readers find more freedom from suffering by making four specific agreements with themselves:

  • Be impeccable with your word

  • Don’t take anything personally

  • Don’t make assumptions

  • Always do your best

The agreement that really hit home for me was “don’t take anything personally”. Many of you know that I am a deeply sensitive person, which most of the time works to my advantage. It allows me to connect with people on a more meaningful level and helps me to treat others the way I’d like to be treated. But where it sometimes shoots me in the foot is when I become overly sensitive to things that people say and do.

I used to work with this person who was on-edge... A LOT. She didn’t have the patience to react in a calm and collected way. Oftentimes the tone she would use felt very condescending, like she was questioning my intelligence. I’ve already got this impostor syndrome thing going on, I don’t need someone questioning my intelligence too. So I would avoid her at all costs. If I just never have to interact with this person, I will never feel dumb, and all will be good! Avoid, avoid, avoid. For all my fellow avoiders out there, you know that avoiding always seems like the right answer at the time. Wrong! It’s never the right answer, and in reflecting, it makes me angry that I would ever give one person that much power over me. I mean, she wasn’t even questioning my intelligence, her tone was.

In the Four Agreements, Ruiz says “You may say, ‘what you are saying is hurting me.’ But it is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I touch by what I have said.” YUP. That’s why I was so triggered by the tone my coworker used with me, because I often felt incompetent and not smart enough for whatever reason. And that’s totally on me.

Fast forward to me trying to not take things personally anymore. You guys, it is incredible how this has given me so much more brain space to care about things that actually matter and affect me. In a way, it’s sort of like setting boundaries in my mind. Think about all of the times someone has commented on what you ate, how you dress, how you raise your kids, where you choose to live, when/if you want to get married, who you love, where you work, what you spend your money on, I could go on and on and on!

Now of course we can’t always react in the moment with this detached, go with the flow, hacunamatata-type attitude. And that will always and forever be the struggle. But know that you can also use this in hindsight. Revisit those frenemies you are harboring some self-righteous anger towards and see if maybe it was because you took things a little too personally, maybe it’s time to soften that stance a bit, forgive and forget. You know you’re doing something right when the time between taking something waaay too personally and forgiving/forgetting gets smaller and smaller.   

If we got upset every single time an opinion is shared or unsolicited advice is given to us, we would drive ourselves mad! And what’s incredible is that people who make these comments typically have NO IDEA they’re offending you, on the contrary they think they are helping the situation.

Frankly, people are hardly ever thinking about you. It is human nature to be self involved. Ruiz says, “Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in.”

Usually when people give you unsolicited advice, it’s just to make themselves feel important, needed, and validated for the decisions they make in their own lives. This realization literally blew my mind. Of course other people’s unsolicited advice/opinions have nothing to do with you, you only perceive them to be personal and pointed.

Changing your perception is hard work and can sometimes fall to the back burner if you’re feeling tired. So if I’m ever feeling particularly stirred up from unsolicited advice I’ve received, I’ll repeat to myself, ”I’m doing the best I can, and I’m exactly where I need to be right now”. And you are too, my loves.

You are EXACTLY where you need to be. And that’s always going to be a beautiful place, free of the silly opinions of others.

-H