Midlife Transformation & Personal Growth

No Self, No Problem

“No self, no problem.” — Commonly attributed to Buddhist teaching

How many of the things we choose to carry around every day are actually problems, and how many only become problems because we take them personally?

I was at a friend’s house for dinner recently, along with a few other couples. Everyone was complimenting the food, and at some point my friend announced, “She’s a great cook.” Her response was immediate, and she was clearly bothered: “So you think I’m a cook?” The rest of us heard praise, but I think she’d been hoping to hear that she cooks well, so what she heard was a label, and she reacted to the label instead of the compliment.

I don’t think that’s unusual. We do some version of it constantly. Someone criticizes something we’ve done, and instead of considering whether there’s any truth to it, we’re already explaining why they’re wrong. Someone doesn’t acknowledge our efforts, and we find ourselves frustrated because we didn’t get the recognition we thought we deserved.

How we react doesn’t change what was said or done. The compliment was still a compliment, the criticism may or may not be fair, and the recognition may never come. What we add is the story about what each one says about us, and that’s where the ego comes in.

We spend so much time protecting the person we believe ourselves to be that we don’t always recognize when we’re the ones making a situation more difficult than it needs to be. That person is the “self” in the saying, and the more attached we become to how we see ourselves, the more personally we tend to take things. We want to be understood, respected, and appreciated, and we want to be right. There’s nothing wrong with wanting any of those things, but when we expect a certain response from other people and don’t get it, how we choose to respond is still our responsibility.

I don’t think letting go of the ego means having no opinions, accepting disrespect, or pretending things don’t bother us. Sometimes we need to defend ourselves, and sometimes the problem really is with someone else. The challenge is recognizing the difference between standing up for something that matters and defending an image of ourselves that we don’t want anyone to question.

The next time someone’s words don’t match what we were hoping to hear, how quickly can we tell which one we’re doing?

#MotivationMonday

No Self, No Problem
A Reflection by Alexander Bush
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One response to “No Self, No Problem”

  1. cristiannorman

    Ego, our own self-image. The idea of who we are and how we want to be seen, in which we feel like we have to protect. And that “image” is how we hear things.

    Epictetus explains, “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of things.” Now this is not necessarily needed to be directed towards a specific gender but everyone in general.

    Criticism feels like a threat on who we are, so the first impulse is to defend ourselves before looking at whether or not the point was valid. Personally, as individuals, I don’t think we should treat every single comment, criticism or compliment as a test of who we are.

    I read a few months back on how, Dale Carnegie actually explains criticism in one of the chapters of How To Win Friends And Influence People. As you said, we do this somewhat constantly, or in other words, I would say unconsciously. Our defensive mechanisms are triggered trying to protect the image.

    The cook story is a perfect example. The compliment was still a compliment but how she heard it depended on how she wanted to be seen. She saw it as a job label, almost a job title, when in reality, it was meant as appreciation for her incredible skill.

    It goes to show that it’s not always what’s said that disturbs us but how we take it and that can turn into problems that weren’t needed in the first place.

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