Most people's moods and actions aren't about you. When you stop taking things personally and repeat "Let their mood be theirs. My life is mine," you reclaim your peace and stop wasting energy trying to fix other people's problems.
Learning how to take nothing personally will change your life because most of what people do, it has nothing to do with you. Let their mood be theirs. Your life is yours. That's where you take your power back. See, one of the biggest ways to lose your peace of mind is to give someone else yours. That's why you're picking up on a tone. That's why you feel like you have to manage their mood because they seem like they got it together, but then they're acting so weird. That's why you gotta learn to just let people deal with themselves. It doesn't mean that you don't have compassion. It doesn't mean that you don't care about people. It means that you recognize that there's a very important boundary between you and other adults. You are not responsible for managing other people's moods. You're not responsible for managing other people's expectations. There's one person that you're responsible for, and it's you. When other people don't like your boundary, when you're letting them be in a bad mood, when you stop fixing everybody else's problems, when you stop bending yourself in knots and twisting yourself into all kinds of uncomfortable positions just to make everybody else happy, when you start drawing that boundary and you just kind of let people deal with themselves and they don't like it, it doesn't mean the boundary's wrong. It means it's working. See, people don't like it when you start changing. That's okay. Let them. You got to focus on the let me part. Let me manage myself. Let their mood be theirs. My mood is mine. Let their life be their life to fix. Let me focus on my life and the things that I need to fix. So here's what I want you to start practicing. When someone comes at you with an attitude, when someone's energy is off, when a text feels weird, when you catch yourself spiraling, when you start feeling like you've got to become the police or the parents to grown adults, I want you to say to yourself out loud, if you can, "Let their mood be theirs." And then you say, "My life is mine." See, you can care about people, without absorbing their problems. You can have compassion that somebody is in a bad mood or feeling disappointed or sad or low or whatever without making it your job to fix it.
Oprah Winfrey: How to Find Your Unique Purpose, Authentic Power, and Calling in Life
