In this blog season of resilience-talk, it’s worth bringing up another flavor of resilience, one that may threaten to elude the hardest of workers, one that may be especially difficult for the most persistent people among us.
What if the failure, the hard knocks, come in the form of, not failed achievements or missed deadlines or lack of recognition. What if they come clothed in the oh-so-disturbing fact that SOMEONE DOES NOT LIKE US?! Hey, high achievers who like pats on the back: Can you get up after that gut punch?
Let’s pause with this meme I have posted a buncha times:
The thing is, not even pizza makes everyone happy. How’s that for reassuring?
Maybe it is your colleague, maybe it is your boss, maybe it is your student, maybe it is someone that reports to you, maybe it is an old friend who seems to no longer be your friend, or a distant cousin or the waiter who seemed to scowl at you, or that Sunday School teacher at church, or that anonymous meanie on the Internet.
Maybe it isn’t even about them liking you personally. Maybe they woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Maybe they just disagree with your stance on something. Maybe they feel like lashing out because someone else was kind of mean to them. Maybe you inadvertently did a thing that really created offense, and maybe you didn’t. Maybe you are literally reading the entire situation wrong and the thing you think is a scowl is actually a half-grin.
Or maybe, perhaps just as likely, they just don’t like you. None of us are for everyone. That’s okay.
We all work in a fairly public job with a pretty large number of humans on a given basis. Many of these people barely know us, spend very few minutes with us, and probably spend very little time thinking about us at all. So when we talk about resilience we are also talking about being a little more self-differentiated, having an identity and sense of self worth that isn’t dependent on a lot of external affirmation from family, friends, co-workers, etc. There is actually a real upside to “not being for everyone.” It means, literally, we can set some boundaries. We can say no thanks. We can choose some friendships and let others naturally fall away. My sense is if you are giving and receiving love from a small group of trusted humans in this life, you’re doing pretty darn well. Keep fighting the good fight. Taylor Swift likes to remind me that there will be haters. Don’t let the haters get you down.
Sometimes we’ve just got to shake it off.