Taking Personally

One of my good friends was telling about some of her experiences. It seems to happen often with her that people advise her “why do you take it personally?”. This is mostly when they have to tell her something cold or callous about her work. And my friend gets stressed by this. So the question was how can one not take personally when one has put all her effort and keenness into a certain thing? For example if you cook with all your love and care for your partner and the partner just says its not tasty enough. How does one deal with it? How does one not  take it personally? When you have put hours of earnest and passionate effort into a report and your colleague brings some stupid unthought argument to show that its not good enough. How do you stay impersonal and unaffected and go with the same colleague in the evening for an official supper? 

So how do we not take things personally? 

I think there are two ways we can look at it. First of all not taking it personally means one has to be detached from it. And this means not getting too much engaged in what you do. If I do not put my best effort then I won’t get so attached to what I do. However this actually means I have to get less passionate about what I do. I lose passion and, hence, I also lose taking comments personally. This is a good plan but not a very positive strategy. There has to be a second way. A more joyful and interesting way. Not this bleak passionless way. 

If we think a bit more then we can see where the real culprit is in all this confusion. In a situation there are two kinds of participants. The first kind of participant is physical consisting of impersonal inanimate things. It includes our work our effort our tools and our product. The second is living things that can judge. 

And there are two kinds of information that we can get from those who judge. One is factual and the other is judgemental. For example factual information will consist of the real characteristics (which is the same for any observer). The judgemental information is something that is given by a person without much thought. These are mostly affected by the person’s own issues and mental state and not by what he or she might be observing. 

So while doing something we should get passionate and personal with the work (which is the nonjudgemental impersonal participant in an event) and not with the ones who may/will judge. And when my product is being judged I have to focus on the factual information I get about it. If someone says that my report is crap then I have to think is it a factual comment or a judgemental? If it is a factual comment then this will be observed by everyone and will be with some reason. If someone says the cake I baked was not tasty then to make it a fact the judge should give me factual reasons about what went wrong. If the comment is without reasons and facts then it is just a “judgemental” information. A judgemental information, as we discussed, does not depend on the product. It just depends on the psychological-condition of the person passing it. If someone did not like my cake (without any apparent reason) then may be that someone has got a headache or some such health problem. Or may be he had a terrible fight an hour before with his friend and is not in a mental state to appreciate anything nice. 

To summarise, I think, the recipe to not take things personally is two fold. Get attached to the work and not to the persons who may be judging it. And while getting information about the work try to discriminate between factual comments and judgemental comments. Factual comments are universal (can be seen by anyone with similar experience) and come with reasons. Judgemental comments are mostly because of the state of mind in which the commentator is (and hence just reflects his mental state and not any attribute of your work). And someone with a bad state of mind just needs our compassion and may be a jaddu ki jhhappi (magical hug)!