Don't take it personally

I don’t know if it’s just me and the way I was raised (I tend to believe that most people I know from Brazil are like that too), but I used to to take personally many things people told me. This is certainly a bad thing to do…

Here in the US, people are not like that. There’s a clear invisible line separating their personal person from the professional person, and no comments made either way is rarely taken personally. A comment about your professional skills is just that, a comment about your professional skills. It was almost unbelievable how people could do that. In my mind, if you talked about me, it was almost a personal attack, regardless of what it was really (how crazy was that?).

Adjusting to that was hell as you might imagine… I was so hung up on the “personal attack” that it was really difficult for me to start thinking differently. Eventuallly I did. Adapting to this mindset has been one invaluable lesson I’ve learned from living here. It has opened my mind to many opportunities I could have lost (and maybe did) because of my silly thinking.