What part of you are you projecting on others?
Carl Jung taught us that what we love about other people we love about ourselves. What we dislike about others, speaks highly of the work we need to do on ourselves. Okay, I know you didn’t want to hear that. And yeah, I know you don’t believe it. And yet, psychologist after psychologist has proven that we project our disowned parts of ourselves onto others.
Look around and decide what you don’t like in other people that you work with.
If you had a problem getting along with your boss, it might not have anything to do with your boss, and you might not have had a good relationship with your previous boss and perhaps the boss before that.
If that’s the case, I’ll bet they all look the same. Why? Because these kinds of things are archetypal. In other words, we repeat the same patterns we had before; patterns so foundational to ourselves that we keep seeing them. So, as you listen to people complain about others in your workplace, notice that oftentimes, what people are really complaining about is their disowned parts of themselves.
Own the parts of you that are the ugly
So instead, ask people for what you want directly. Own the parts of you that are the ugly little part of you; that evil twin that comes along to work every day.
As you own that and look at that, it gives you the ability to say, Hmm, okay, I could be doing some work on myself. I’m going to stop making it about others and instead, step into it and realize that it’s my job to decide to love everybody with whom I work.
We still have our lines in the sand asking for what we need, but we can do it with kindness and gentleness, and just create a better awareness as opposed to being upset by it, and then we can stop projecting our disowned parts of ourselves onto others.
I bet we’ll be a whole lot happier being ourselves and being with the people that we’re around.