How To Stop Taking Things Personally at Work

It's Probably Not About You

There's a particular kind of workplace paranoia that most of us have experienced but few of us admit to. Your boss sends an all-company email reminding everyone to do X. You forgot to do X that morning. Suddenly, inexplicably, an email addressed to four hundred people feels like it was written specifically, personally, for you.

We know, rationally, that it wasn't. And yet.

There is something about the dynamics of a workplace — particularly one that's stressful, or badly managed, or simply very human — that has a way of activating our most self-referential instincts. We become, without quite meaning to, the protagonist of a drama in which we are both the central character and, somehow, the subject of everyone else's attention. The colleague who didn't say good morning. The meeting we weren't copied into. The feedback that landed harder than it should have. All of it funnels, almost automatically, through the question: was that about me?

I recently had my first 360 review — the kind where colleagues at every level of the business, from assistants to the CEO, anonymously assess your performance, and you then sit with your manager and go through it. I've spent most of my career as a writer, which means I've developed reasonably thick skin when it comes to feedback on work. But being a member of staff rather than a freelancer is different. It's not just the output under scrutiny — it's you. Your behaviour, your demeanour, your presence in a room. There is, by design, nowhere to hide.

I found it, to my surprise, genuinely useful. It helped that it was delivered with care, and that there was space to think things through. But it also required something I hadn't quite anticipated: a willingness to hear how others experience you, even when that doesn't map neatly onto how you experience yourself. A necessary humbleness. An ego, at least temporarily, set aside.

Not everyone finds that easy. A friend of mine — I'll call her Emma — spent several years trying to build a career as a designer before eventually retraining as a teacher. She describes a working relationship with a creative director that slowly dismantled her. "I'd put hours and hours into a piece of work only to be told she didn't think it was good enough," she says. "I was so desperate to please her that I stopped thinking about what I believed was good and just tried to make work she would like. It meant that when she still didn't like it, I was broken." She pauses. "I realised I cared too much to be able to receive feedback. It always felt like a personal insult."

When I ask her whether the problem was her own confidence or her boss's delivery, she doesn't hesitate: "Both." Her creative director, she thinks, could have been more sensitive. But she also recognises, with the distance of years, that she hadn't yet learned to separate herself from her work — to understand that a critique of the thing you made is not the same as a verdict on who you are.

That separation is hard-won, and it isn't just about confidence in the conventional sense. It's about having enough of a self outside of work that the workplace doesn't become the primary place where your worth is determined. When it does — when the job becomes the main source of validation, of identity, of proof that you are capable and valued and enough — the ordinary frictions of professional life start to feel existential. A lukewarm response to an idea. A piece of feedback that stings. A colleague who seems, for reasons you can't quite identify, to have taken against you. Any of it can feel, in the wrong conditions, like evidence of something catastrophic.

It rarely is. But that's almost beside the point, because once the paranoia takes hold, it becomes its own kind of reality.

I spoke to a CEO of a tech start-up who described the moment she realised she'd sent a message she deeply regretted. Mid-lockdown, exhausted, trying to keep the business afloat while home-schooling her son, she fired off an email to a team member she felt wasn't pulling her weight — one that essentially told her the company's survival rested on her shoulders. "She has a nice house and a garden," she told me. "Lockdown wasn't hard for her the way it was for me." She cringes at it now. Her colleague, rather than responding in kind, called her. She'd been quietly caring for an elderly relative and hadn't told anyone. They had an honest conversation. The situation — which had briefly felt, to both of them, like a conflict about something fundamental — dissolved into simple context. Two people, both struggling, neither of whom had been able to see past their own circumstances far enough to see the other's.

"She really could have been upset with my email and taken it personally," the CEO told me. "I'm grateful she was confident enough not to."

That confidence — the kind that lets you absorb something that feels pointed without immediately building a case around it — is partly temperament, partly experience, and partly a deliberate practice. It means giving people the benefit of the doubt not because you're passive or naive, but because you understand that most human behaviour, especially the behaviour that feels directed at you, is actually generated by something else entirely. Someone else's stress. Someone else's morning. Someone else's entirely unrelated bad day.

None of which is to minimise the times when something genuinely is personal — when behaviour crosses into harassment or discrimination or the low-level cruelty that can make a workplace quietly unbearable. Those things are real and they matter and they deserve to be named. But they are also distinct from the far more common experience of being a person among people — fallible, complicated, occasionally thoughtless people — and learning to move through that without absorbing it as evidence of your own diminishment.

The most useful thing I took from my 360 review wasn't any individual piece of feedback. It was the reminder that other people's perception of you is data, not verdict. That you can hold it, turn it over, take from it what's useful, and set down what isn't. That caring about your work and your impact doesn't require you to care so much that every signal becomes a signal about your worth.

Most of the time, the all-company email really is for everyone. You just happened to read it on a day when it landed differently.