Allow me to paint a picture. You invite someone out to coffee, a friend you haven’t seen in a while. It’s a coffee date you’re really looking forward to. You think about it all day, and you debate whether to text that person and share your excitement. But ultimately decide against it, as you don’t want to seem too eager. Then the time comes. You drive downtown, park your car, walk to the coffee shop and you’re the first person there. So you debate for a moment where to sit and decide on a window seat away from the rest of the crowd. Time ticks by and you check your phone. It’s only a few minutes after your meeting time, but you start to wonder if they’re going to show. Then finally, you see them. They stroll up the sidewalk, a serious look on their face. They walk through the door, and they stroll over to you casually, barely making eye contact. Something begins to nag at you. They seem off.

This becomes the theme for the entire conversation, actually. They seem distant, disengaged and unwilling to really connect in the way you’d been hoping for all day. The thoughts begin to race. “Did I offend them?” you think, and you start thinking about your relationship, taking inventory and going over every disagreement you’ve had with this friend. You didn’t pay them back for gas the last time you saw them; that must be it. That’s when your mood starts to shift, and you feel yourself grow confused, caught off guard and maybe a touch resentful. After all, you had been looking forward to this all day. At the end of it all, you find yourself disengaged, or maybe you find yourself overcompensating, trying to engage as much as possible. At the end of the interaction, you find yourself in your car, ready to head home, deeply confused and disappointed.

Then a text comes through on your phone. “Sorry if I seemed off. I didn’t sleep well last night.” Notice throughout that entire hypothetical, I didn’t mention a single word spoken
between you and this old friend. Yet, if that internal narrative seems familiar to you, know two things. First and foremost, you’re far from being the only human that’s thought like
this. Second, there’s a chance you’ve engaged in personalization. Personalization is when we take responsibility for things ultimately outside of our control. You had no control over the fact that your friend woke up on the wrong side of the bed, but nevertheless you took responsibility for it. There are three ways to view responsibility and control. There are things that are directly in our control, like what we choose to say to people. Things that are outside of our control, like whether our friend who’s meeting us for coffee wakes up on the right side of the bed or not. Lastly, the one that’s the most difficult for us is that which we can influence but ultimately do not control the outcome of, like how a difficult conversation will be emotionally received by someone else. Our words we control; their response we do not.

That grumpy friend you met for coffee — they may not actually be angry with you at all. In fact, it’s a kindness to them and yourself to not assume they’re angry with you until it’s communicated clearly and respectfully. But it applies to other things as well. That time you noticed someone succeeded and you felt bad about your own abilities or even felt unworthy, you did not control their success or failure, and their achievement has nothing to do with what you’re capable of. At the end of the day, it’s up to us to look at these three realities — direct control, influence and no control — and determine how much personal responsibility we need to take for each. If we wrong someone in a situation that we had direct control over, an apology may be warranted. Or maybe you were both impacted by an external event that neither of you had control over, but it would still be easy to assign blame. Should we take responsibility for that? It’s a nuanced conversation, and as always, every situation is unique and different.

But to have that conversation, practice some self-compassion by recognizing when you are personalizing something. Practically, you can check the facts. I always like to consult with a lawyer in my head to see if I’d have grounds to bring my assumption to trial. Did that person actually say they were upset with me? Am I basing my assumption more off of facts or emotions? Demonstrating this kind of self-compassion can seem radical and will cause us to feel the discomfort of uncertainty. But ultimately, we will spend less time and energy worrying about things outside of our control if we can allow ourselves to not personalize.