The Hidden Work of Growth #2: Don’t take it personally
In this four-part series, I want to show what it means to work on capability development by sharing real stories. This one is about professional toughness.
By Elina ·
Although the workplace is full of processes, automations and data-driven decisions, we all know it’s also a place heaving with emotions, personality clashes and dramas.
And although I don’t have a statistic to back it up, a phrase along the lines of “don’t take it personally, it’s just work” would probably be somewhere in the top five most-used pieces of career advice, alongside “just be more confident”, which we talked about last time.
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And this is what the heroine of this week’s story has been battling with. Let’s call her Fiona.
Fiona is an agreeable and energetic person. She has progressed in her career partly because she was not just helpful, she saw and fixed issues before people even came to her.
But at this point in her career, she needs more than being a fixer. She needs to influence, and she is starting to realise that simply being useful will not help her grow further.
She is frustrated because although she is always willing to go the extra mile for others, there is nobody anymore who is developing her or supporting her. Her manager is more of an adversary in conversations with leadership than her champion and supporter. Cross-functional stakeholders don’t rush to act on her requests. She doesn’t like nagging. She hates pushing her agenda.
The people around her seem to know how to talk. She feels she can’t outtalk them. And when she puts something on the table and gets interrupted once, twice, she shuts down and withdraws: “Why bother trying?”
And why does she withdraw?
Because these interactions are really hitting home. They feel personal and emotional. She doesn’t want to be seen as emotional, but she worries she won’t be able to manage these emotions, the upset, vulnerability and anger, in the moment. So she prefers to shut down and withdraw instead, to stay safe.
We started exploring the process, tracking how things happen externally and internally, and establishing the chain of events, thoughts and feelings.
What’s really going on here?
When we look closer, we can see that there is something hidden in between the situation (they interrupted) and the reaction (I feel so emotional, I withdraw).
And that something is interpretation.
Someone interrupts → they don’t respect me.
Someone challenges → they are trying to undermine me.
Someone doesn’t engage → they have already decided they don’t want to listen.
And it’s the interpretation that often shapes and intensifies the emotional response. Who wouldn’t feel hurt if you believed you were being undermined, not respected or dismissed?
The reaction is understandable. The emotions may be completely justified.
But is the interpretation correct?
The first reframe — space
We often think professional toughness means controlling our emotions, always looking strong and powerful, being in control, being assertive.
And when we don’t feel exactly that way, some people feel weak, vulnerable or flawed. They feel like an imposter.
They keep repeating: Don’t get emotional. Don’t take it personally. Stay calm.
But what if the more useful capability is being able to notice the reaction without immediately believing the story attached to it?
When something happens, our brain fills in the blanks with a story or an explanation.
What happened → what I assumed → what I felt → how I responded.
And because the response feels completely justified, we often don’t notice the assumptions in the middle.
What if we stop at step one and, before we build a story, ask:
“What evidence do I actually have before I decide what this interaction means?”
And the answer might be: “I have no evidence at the moment, and I am not in the mood to find out.”
And that alone could be enough. Just catching yourself in that moment of sense-making, before you turn an assumption into an undeniable reality, creates a little more space.
The second reframe — choice
You are still likely to feel emotions anyway. That tightness in your throat. The rush of adrenaline and anger. The tears coming up.
Our first instinct can be to shut down the emotions, and in the moment that can actually be a useful self-regulation move.
The problem starts when we shut them down as something shameful, unprofessional or undesirable. An hour after the episode we are still beating ourselves up for feeling emotional and weak.
But these emotions could actually be telling us something important.
We can give people the benefit of the doubt first. But we should not be surprised by the possibility that people can also be rude, mean, biased or belittling, or that they might be trying to establish control at the expense of someone they perceive as weaker.
This is the second point worth paying attention to. Self-regulation is not just about using all your willpower to show up calm and collected while you are crying or shouting inside.
It is also the capability to decouple emotions from decisions.
The anger and hurt are information. The capability is to capture that information in time and adjust your actions accordingly and appropriately.
You do not have to shout louder. But you can make a choice to make sure your boundaries are known in no vague terms.
Mastering this kind of emotional regulation in the middle of a stressful situation can be a long learning journey. It is hard.
But what helps us start on this journey is the work afterwards: having a practice of processing the emotions, accepting them, listening to their message and exploring their origins.
No, they don’t take the driver’s seat. But they have a space to tell you something important that you could not hear when you were busy shutting them down.
For Fiona, the challenge is the vulnerable emotions: feeling dismissed and exposed. These feelings can bring up our younger parts.
They are looking for protection, but what do we often do? We shame them even more and beat ourselves up for having them. But they don’t go anywhere. They accumulate more hurt and more feelings of dismissal, only to surface with more power the next time something triggers them.
What is behind professional toughness?
This helps us redefine professional toughness as maturity. It is not a capability of “not feeling” and being strong and assertive no matter what life throws at you. Behind real professional maturity, there is a different set of capabilities that you can develop and practise:
Emotional self-regulation: you know what’s happening with you in the moment, without being overwhelmed by it.
Perspective-taking: you can see where you stand and where the other person stands, and what is happening in the dynamic, instead of being drowned by your own assumptions and perception of the situation.
Relational agency: you make choices about how to act effectively. Sometimes that means being understanding. Sometimes it means being tough and putting a boundary around unacceptable behaviour. Sometimes it means backing off and shifting your attention towards understanding the other person’s needs with empathy.
You cannot practise “not taking things personally”. You can practise creating more space between what happens and how you choose to respond.
This is the kind of hidden work we explore in Capability Practice. Not how to perform the perfect leadership behaviour, but what is happening underneath the behaviour, what capability would give you more choice, and what you can practise in the situations where it actually matters.
If there is something in your professional life that you know you want to change, but advice and good intentions have not quite translated into a different way of operating, Capability Practicemight be a useful next step.
As a Leadership Capability subscriber, use code SUBSTACK26 when you apply. If you decide to continue with the full programme, the cost of one session will be deducted from the full programme price.
And if someone came to mind while reading this, feel free to forward it to them.
Elina
*The cases in The Hidden Work of Growth series are inspired by real coaching work. Names and identifying details have been changed to protect confidentiality. Each story may also combine recurring patterns observed across several clients, although one particular coaching journey remains the main inspiration for each story.
Originally published on Substack.