What is one key characteristic of a sensitive people? They over analyze things – and that is what we are going to take advantage of here – to handle the sensitivity and avoid taking things personally. That is cool, isn’t? Turning a perceived negative trait to help you…
- Key thing to keep in mind is – our brain is malleable – keep that in the back of your mind – read up about neuroplasticity to gain confidence on this. You don’t have to be suffer for being a sensitive person and you can instead start enjoying it.
- Next embrace being a sensitive person – this was one of my learning – because I kept refusing to acknowledge that I am a sensitive person – the tools I kept applying failed because they were not suited for a sensitive person. Acknowledge that you have the power of empathy and hence feel everything so deeply. Self acceptance and being proud of who you are is one of the most empowering gift you can give to yourself.
- When you are upset or hurt, acknowledge those feelings and thoughts.
- Be intentional when you do that:
- Read up on action vs motion by James clear in his book Atomic Habits
- Motion: Often we overanalyze but overanalyzing does not get us anywhere and instead causing pain and anxiety.
- Action: Instead actively act on the tools that you learnt.
- and that can only be done if you are really intentional about applying the tools
- Understanding that others don’t feel the same deep impact as you do: this is life-changing. Often we assume that the other person is rude and we yearn for a more respectful and gentle world. However the truth is, the other person does not feel the impact as deeply as a sensitive person does. In fact couple of times when I proactively approached and talked about so called ‘rude’ behaviors, I often found out that it was more a communication gap and they were not intentional in hurting others.
- Work on the actions that you derived from your acknowledged, intentional analysis of the situation and act on it.
Since experience is more relatable than theory, I am going to try and explain these with a real-life scenario.
Let me talk about a time, I goofed up a meeting. I worked hard on something and in just 5-10 mins of incorrect delivery of communication, it created a domino effect and the entire session went downhill. The moment I realized my mistake, I bit my tongue and tried to course correct but the damage was done.
I was embarrassed and upset about it.
Before I learned and intentionally started applying the tools, the thought of failure would have continued to stay with me forever and continued to eat me alive. I would have kept overanalyzing it and reliving the bad experience again and again. Which meant that, in further such scenarios/situations, would leave me less confident and causing this downward spiral and loss of intrinsic motivation. It is a really bad cycle to be in – low confidence -> impacts your skill (whichever skill you are working on at that moment) -> skill impacted -> again dip in confidence -> again impact to the skill.
Since starting to acknowledging who I am, it has been more feasible to process these experiences and turn them into learning opportunities. Here is what I did.
| Motion | Process the emotion | I let myself be upset about it for sometime. | Depending on where you are in this journey, it might take anywhere from few hours to few days to process these emotions |
| Action | Retro | – I reached out for feedback from my manager. – I promised myself that I won’t be defensive and listen to feedback as it was – Got a clear and concise feedback – and what I should do better. – I noted it down | – Listening to a feedback about your mistake is a hard pill to swallow, however unless you tackle that part, it is hard to identify the area of growth |
| Motion | My own retro & Root cause | – I broke it down and identified what happened and why: – Physical – sleep deprivation, dehydration – emotional – constant context switching throughout the day which is so hard on a introvert brain – external factors – distractions and other stress inducing incidents during the day/week | Based on the situation some of the actions may be beyond your control. In that case, focus on what you need to do to process the emotion. Refer self-care section |
| Motion | How to fix it | – ramp-up on communication styles – ramp-up on how to be grounded when brain is overworked. – self-care and health – recognize signs of introvert burn out and – sticking to the script during burnouts and staying grounded. | |
| Action | How to fix it | – Signed up for different but short communication courses | |
| Action | Show up | Learned about personal branding – Started showing up and being active in different meetings. | This helps build confidence and tackle factors beyond our control more confidently |
| Motion | Self-care | Sleep, water intake | |
| Action | Be intentional | Subsequent days, when the memories of that event came up – I was more intentional about letting the thought go and not let it stick: ‘okay I am recalling this incident again since I am sensitive. I know it was a mistake and I am taking corrective action to fix it. I don’t have to keep reliving it.’ | Note This has been the hardest part in the past but post acceptance and after avoiding burying it or bottling it up, it has been better. |
| Action | Deal with it and don’t bury it | Used the step above and did not try to bury myself or suppress the thoughts Avoided screen time when the thought hits | One of the common mistakes we do is trying to stop thinking about it and burying ourself in harmless and harmful addictive behaviors. e.g. screen addiction smoke addiction. Try to resist that and process the thoughts instead. |
| Action | Self-care | Increased water intake | |
| Motion | Self-care | one activity (walk) and fill other areas of the cup | These activities help both physically and emotionally |
As you can see, being intentional and acting upon the various factors is more impactful and increases your confidence and reduces the pain from the emotions.
PS:
this post is almost inviting someone into my brain – you can see inner workings of an introvert and a sensitive person. To be honest, quite awkward to post this, but like vasospasm, there is probably someone else going through this and hope it helps that someone.