Why You Take Things Personally and How to Stop: Heath Butler (Transcript)

And then, at the peak, the realization of your highest potential—self-actualization. Meeting the needs at one level allows us to move up to the next level.

And we can’t be our best selves until we meet our needs. Thankfully, most of us have food, water, and safety. So our focus is on filling needs like belonging, being valued, human connection. As we move up the hierarchy and our needs change, so does the way self-preservation appears in our lives. Instead of fighting for survival, we fight to protect our relationships, our values, our comfort. Instead of foraging for food, we write an email to a large restaurant chain about their new coffee bean.

Change Management and Self-Preservation

I’ve worked in the field of change management for the past four years. Change management is a process that helps people understand the reasons why a business is changing something. It’s my job to help people buy in and be successful with those changes. Some of them are huge, like organizational restructures. **Other ones are small, like a software update.

What’s fascinating about this field is that almost every single time a change is introduced, people respond the same way**. How does this affect me? And there’s nothing wrong with that response, especially when we recognize that we all experience the world from our own self-perspective.

The Backpack Experiment

I did an experiment in college to prove this hypothesis. Okay, it wasn’t an experiment per se. It was more of a prank. But I learned from it, so it counts. A campus group hosted a midweek meal for students, and most of us would drop our backpacks off in the lounge area before going into the big room for lunch. One day my friend and I thought it might be fun if we hid all of the backpacks in a closet. So we did, and we waited.

And as soon as lunch was over, people’s responses were immediately self-focused. Frantically, they all began searching for their own backpack, not recognizing that all of the backpacks were missing. It wasn’t until someone found the closet full of backpacks that their mindset shifted from where’s my backpack to here are our backpacks. When faced with uncertainty, their first response was to think of themselves. The same is true of us.

Balancing Self-Preservation and Helping Others

So how do we reconcile this desire to meet our own needs and self-preserve when survival of the fittest says there’s a clear winner and a clear loser, it’s me or it’s you? How have we made it this far with that motivation? We’ve only made it this far because we’ve had people in our lives help us meet our needs. And they could only help us because their needs were met. **So it’s not selfish to desire to have your needs met.

In fact, you truly can’t help others if they aren’t**. The golden rule says treat others the way you want to be treated. Simple phrase, but it shows us something very powerful. There’s a connection between meeting our own needs and helping others meet their needs. That duality is critical.

Thankfully, the idea has been around for ages and it’s evident in different cultures, religions, and philosophies. Yin and Yang in Chinese philosophy views everything as being connected. A balance of opposing forces, contradictory and complimentary, on their own valuable, but when combined, greater. Namaste in Hinduism illustrates this as well. The spirit in me recognizes the spirit in you. I recognize and honor both my value and your value. In Christianity, it’s love others as you love yourself. All of these viewpoints imply that we must value both ourselves and each other.

We must look out for our own needs and help others meet their needs.

The Coping Stances Model

How do we do that practically? Virginia Satir, considered a pioneer in family therapy and psychology, illustrates this in her coping stances model. In the coping stances model, she calls that balance congruence. Congruence consists of three distinct parts, you, others, and context. You is obviously yourself. Others can be an individual or a group and context is the current situation. For there to be balance, all three areas must be acknowledged and considered. But if one or more are not, there’s an imbalance and it results in coping behaviors like blaming, people pleasing, over rationalizing, or even irrelevance.

What was missing in my coffee crisis? I considered the situation the coffee had changed. I considered myself. I did not like the change. I didn’t consider others or the large corporation. I didn’t think about the reasons why they changed or how that change impacted them.

Think about situations in your life when you’ve taken something personally. As we gain awareness that we’re all trying to self-preserve, how could considering yourself and others in context change your response to make life better?

Applying the Model in the Workplace

I talked through one of these situations in my workplace. A human resources representative made a full-time job offer to a part-time staff member who desperately wanted to be full-time. So it seemed like a very obvious decision. However, as the deadline approached, the HR representative became frustrated because she still hadn’t received a response.

So we talked through some of the potential impacts to that part-time employee if she made this change. More hours at work meant less hours at home, and she had two young children at the time. So that meant their routines had to change as well. Later mornings, later evenings, plus additional childcare that they didn’t have before. The employee also enjoyed her co-workers at her current location. Accepting the job meant a move and having to build relationships all over again.

As we talked through these things, the mindset of the HR rep shifted. Instead of seeing this as just a task to check off her list, she started to see the human impact. When she only considered herself in a situation, there was an imbalance and frustration. But when she considered all three aspects, she didn’t have a task to check off her list, there was a job offer with a deadline to accept it, and there were needs from that part-time employee, that frustration was replaced with empathy.

Conclusion

Being aware that self-preservation drives human behavior can change our responses and make life better. It can help us not get so upset or frustrated when someone holds up a task, or backpacks go missing, or coffee beans change. It can help us look out for our own needs and the needs of others.

What if we changed our mindset from, I am the most important person in this room, to I am one important person in a room full of important people. Remember, we are human, we’re self-preserving, and I hope you take that personally.

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