Jul 1, 2019
I want to share what happened last week when I asked my dear friend for her feedback about this podcast. She gave me some great, honest advice. She said she could tell I’m reading from a script, and she wants to hear ME, my personality. I thanked her and then quickly had to get off the phone because Hunter was having a meltdown in the car – so I was really abrupt.
I believe our relationships are here to help awaken our consciousness, learn lessons about ourselves, expand and grow into our fullest selves. If we are unconscious, then we may miss the lesson. If we are open and aware, we will deepen our relationship with ourselves as well as our connection to each other.
So, one of the things I have been working on my whole life is being open to criticism. I am a very sensitive soul, and I used to get my feelings hurt with any kind of criticism. Instead of seeing criticism as feedback, I totally saw it as failure. Often this would completely stop me from moving forward, or I would quit all together.
Similarly, one of the things my friend is working on is being okay to share and speak her voice, that giving her opinion, when asked is totally great to share. When you bottle up your emotions, they come out in unexpected ways. Healthy communication is a great skill to have, but it takes practice.
Because I had to get off the phone so quickly, I think it triggered a doubt in her that maybe she shouldn’t have shared her opinion or that I was offended. She called me later that week, but I didn’t return her call because I was busy. Our minds can wander into so many stories, that aren’t true. When she called me a second time, I knew that maybe something was triggered and that I needed to call her back to reassure her that her feedback was appreciated and that I wasn’t mad.
It was so subtle, that if I wasn’t conscious I would probably miss it and she may have been feeling guilty or upset with herself for sharing. If we both weren’t working on ourselves, I may have taken her criticism personally or she may have continued to turn some false story about how I’m not calling her back because I’m mad at her. That’s the power of our mind. It can play tricks on us.
Only through consciousness can we create our change. That’s the great thing about working on yourself, is that we are in relationship together to grow. At the end of the day we are both the same souls who want the same thing and have the same fears. We both don’t want to be rejected. We are both learning the same lesson to let go of feeling offended and not take situations personally.
So for mantra Monday, my invitation is Don’t take it personally. This is way easier to say than to do. We get triggered by something and our mind takes us down various scenarios and what-ifs. It’s like wearing pink sunglasses and thinking everything in the world is pink, but all we need to do is remove our rose-colored glasses to see clearly.
A lot of the time it has nothing to do with you. If you can show up open without any preconceived notions, how would you should up differently? How would this open your mind if you can remove your rose-colored glasses. What is there? What isn’t there? Would you be more relaxed and show up authentically if you could drop your defenses and judgements?
I have been working on this for decades of trying to let go of things personally, dropping the stories and what-ifs and accepting it’s really impossible to know exactly how the other person is feeling, and that it probably has nothing to do with me. I hope this helps you too this week to relax, let go of worry and just BE YOU!