How Much of Your Life Are You Allowing Other People’s Behaviour to Control?When was the last time someone sent you a rude email? An adversary said something untrue about you? You were left out of a conversation? Someone challenged your work? Or perhaps someone you care about behaved towards you in a way you simply didn’t understand. Almost immediately, we start creating a narrative to make sense of it. What does that mean?
Are they annoyed with me?
Have I done something wrong?
Why didn’t they even say hello? And suddenly, something that may have occupied someone else’s thoughts for 30 seconds has occupied the last four hours of yours. The event is real. Your interpretation is something else. We don’t always react to what actually happened. We react to the meaning we’ve attached to it. The email may have been abrupt because they were having a terrible morning. They may have been distracted. They may simply have behaved badly. We don’t always know. Yet we can spend an extraordinary amount of emotional energy trying to work out what someone else’s behaviour means about us. Which brings me to a question: Who have you given a seat at your emotional table? It’s an odd question, isn’t it? But there are people in our lives who can change our entire mood without even being in the room. We replay what they said.
We wonder what they think.
We question ourselves.
We adjust our behaviour. We give their actions far more space in our heads than they probably ever intended to take. And, without realising it, we give them influence over how confident we feel and how we see ourselves. Now, this isn’t about pretending we don’t care what other people think. Of course we care. Relationships matter. Reputation matters. Feedback matters. But there is a difference between taking something on board and allowing it to take over. Someone can be unhappy with you without you being a failure. They can disagree with you without you being wrong. They can criticise you without that criticism defining you. And someone else’s behaviour — even when it’s unkind, unfair or difficult to understand — doesn’t have to become a judgement about who you are. So here’s the challenge I’d like to leave you with this week. When someone’s behaviour gets under your skin, pause before you react and ask: What do I actually know? And then: What else could be true? That little pause creates some much-needed space between what happened and what you decide it means. You don’t necessarily need to remove people from your emotional table. You may simply need to change their position. But don’t hand them responsibility for how you feel about yourself. That’s your seat. And you should probably keep hold of it. You’re doing great! Michelle
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