|
Helen Ostenberg Elswit, our Guest of
the Month, has had to deal with verbal
attacks in her profession as a Visual
Effects Producer. Here she explains how
she has handled such tough situations:
The biggest lesson I've learned, which
applies to every type of setting, is not
to take things personally. On the whole,
I've been fortunate to work with people
who are lovely, who are wonderful, who
are not screamers. But I've found myself
in situations in which I felt personally
attacked, and I didn't know what I had
done to cause that. I've found it helpful
to look at the situation, remove "person"
from it, and refuse to take offense. When
I was able to put myself in the other's
shoes in order to understand what was
causing the attack, I discovered that
what I was dealing with was a sense of
fear: the other person was fearful of
something. As a result, I was able to
impersonalize that fear and not see the
person as evil, as someone who was out
to get me. Seeing the people who attacked
me as children of God - loved by God and
loving because they are His children -
completely dispelled their fear and changed
that situation. What we're always dealing
with is our own consciousness - how we
are thinking about what's going on around
us. Once we address and change our own
consciousness, the situation changes because
we see it differently. And then we can
do the extra-kind thing and reach out
to the person in a way that helps dispel
the fear, which heals the situation. We
are then no longer perceived as the source
of the problem.
|
