Episode 929: It’s Not Personal
[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: [00:00:00] Thanks for joining me on episode 929 of the inspired stewardship podcast.
[00:00:07] Orly Wahba: [00:00:07] I'm Orly Wahba. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent and your treasures to live out. Your calling focus on kindness is a key and one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this.
[00:00:24] The inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott.
[00:00:28]Scott Maderer: [00:00:28] it looks like something that is wrong. This feels like it's personal. This feels like it's mistreating me. And that doesn't feel good while still also recognizing it probably wasn't singling me out. It probably wasn't directed at you. Making my life, a little rougher. It probably wasn't directed at just making things stink for me.
[00:00:54] Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you [00:01:00] truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true. In the inspired stewardship podcast, we'll learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.
[00:01:20]In today's episode about developing your influence through stewarding your talent. I talk with you about why the statement it's not personal it's business is seldom really altered. I also share why it's also true that it's usually not about you. And I talk about how to balance your feelings while still recognizing this idea of how it's not about you, but it's also personal, not you've heard me talk about developing your talent and what are the best ways to do that is through books.
[00:01:54] But if you're like most people today, it's hard to find the time to read. And that's why [00:02:00] today's podcast is brought to you by audible. Go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial. There's over 180,000 titles to choose from. And you can pick one and listen your way to developing your talents via.
[00:02:21] That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books the same way you're listening to this podcast. One of the things. Dr. Sharon Grossman and I talked about was how often times whenever somebody does something or says something and we feel that it's all about us. It may not be.
[00:02:44] And it got me thinking as well. I've often heard the opposite of that, where people will do something. And then they'll say, it's not personal. It was just business. And it got me thinking about how there is two things here and they're both true. And yet at first [00:03:00] glance, they may not seem like they could be.
[00:03:03] Let's talk first about, it's not personal it's business. Here's the interesting thing about that. When businesses are interacting, when a business does something. It's not really this entity doing it. It's the people that make the entity up. And what's more the choices that the people in the business are making affect other people, whether that's other businesses and the people in those, whether it's those, their clients, whether it's their own employees.
[00:03:33] The truth is the word personal has person in it. So by definition, if there are people involved in the situation, it is personal. It's not just business. The truth is oftentimes we use that as an excuse. I want to do something and I need to justify it. And so I'm going to do this thing that would normally be unacceptable.
[00:03:57] It would normally be something that I wouldn't do I [00:04:00] would choose not to do because I'm a good person and I care about other people, but I'm going to justify it because it's done in the name of business. And this idea that there are it's okay to do the wrong thing. The ends justify the means, or there is a time and a place where doing the wrong thing is okay.
[00:04:18] Makes it easier and easier to mistreat others, to not serve others, to give the things to other people that they don't really deserve to not treat them. And it allows us to take off. Other opportunities and other things that let us do the wrong thing. Even outside of business, it allows us to say that the justification for doing this the ends justify the mean it's and let's take it a step further and talk about a little bit about the, it's not about you mentality that Dr. Sharon was talking about, the truth is we often tell people, oh, just don't take it personally. It's not about you. And that's not what she was [00:05:00] saying. Don't get me wrong. What she was saying.
[00:05:02] Oftentimes, when we feel that something is directed at us, it's actually not directed at us. And that can be true in this it's about business. Not personal to the business is just doing things because it's trying to serve the bottom line or it's trying to make more money and it's not directed at you.
[00:05:21] But at the same time to tell someone don't take it personally is to devalue their feelings about the situation and it doesn't change how they feel and it doesn't change how they react at all. And yet the truth is it really, isn't usually about you. It's a broader decision. It's a bigger impact.
[00:05:41] It's about more than that. It's about just other things that may have nothing to do with. When people sometimes lash out at you because they're having a bad day, we feel like it's directed at us. When in reality it's more about them and how they're feeling, whatever somebody [00:06:00] does, something that is wrong or unethical or mistreats us.
[00:06:03] We feel that it was directed at us and it is. The truth is you have to balance that feeling. You have to acknowledge your feelings. You have to recognize that this feels like an injustice. This feels like something that is bad to us. This feels like something that is wrong. This feels like it's personal.
[00:06:23] This feels like it's mistreating me. And that doesn't feel good while still also recognizing it probably wasn't singling me out. It probably wasn't directed at just making my life a little rougher. It probably wasn't directed at just making things stink for me. It was probably bigger than that. It may have had something to do with the other person.
[00:06:49] It may have had something to do with decisions that were made completely devoid of even knowing that I was going to be as a result of that decision affected. [00:07:00] It's probably by something or someone outside of our, my control. Now don't get me wrong. That doesn't mean you excuse the behavior. That doesn't mean you accept it.
[00:07:10] That doesn't mean you continue to do business with that business. If they're mistreating people, that doesn't mean that you stay employed in a business that's being unethical. You stand up for what is right. But you do it recognizing that it wasn't personal, that keeps it from getting as angry and makes it more about let's just handle the situation.
[00:07:31] Let's just take care of what needs to be taken care of. And when we do that, we often can make more progress while still acknowledging how we feel recognizing that it's not a good feeling and recognizing that it probably wasn't directed at us, allows us to move forward more productively. Thanks for listening.
[00:07:54]Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast. As a [00:08:00] subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the stewardship of talent, you can go over to inspired stewardship.com/talent and sign up for our five week series.
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