By Jill Hinrichs, PCC | Sr. Consultant and Strategy Lead
Everyone brings HR their hardest moments. Since COVID especially, HR professionals have become the organization’s Chief Empathy Officers, the people who absorb the difficult conversations, the anxieties, the conflicts, and the grief of an entire workforce. The advice that follows is almost always the same: take care of yourself first.
It’s good advice, and it’s nearly impossible to act on. “Focus on yourself” is a sentiment, not a method. It tells you what to do without showing you how, or what doing it well would even look like.
This piece offers the how: a practical way to stop taking things personally at work, without caring any less. And the mechanism turns out to be something you already use every day, expertly, on everyone but yourself.
Reading the Need Beneath the Words
When someone comes to you upset, you are reading the need, whether or not you have ever named it. You hear what they say. You decode what they actually mean beneath the words. You answer what they truly need, which is rarely the thing they first demanded.
You already know that the surface message is not the whole message. A complaint about a policy is often a fear about fairness. A demand for action is often a need to feel heard. Your skill is reading past the words to the need underneath, and then responding to that.
This is what negotiation expert Chris Voss calls tactical empathy: showing a person you understand their feeling and perspective, not to manipulate them, but because it is the fastest route to genuine resolution. When someone feels understood, they can finally listen. You are not agreeing with them by understanding them. You are making it possible for them to hear you.
You do this instinctively, all day, for other people. Which raises the obvious question: why don’t you read your own needs the same way?
How to Read Your Own Needs the Same Way
When a hard exchange leaves you rattled, most of us skip straight to judgment: I should not have let that get to me. I need to be more resilient. But that’s not reading the need. That’s just a harsher version of the surface message, aimed inward.
Reading the need works the same in both directions. After a difficult moment, run the same three steps you would for anyone else:
- Hear what you are saying. What is actually going through your mind right now? It’s not what you think you should feel. What do you actually feel?
- Decode what you mean. What is the need underneath it? “I am furious” might decode to “I need to feel respected.” “I am exhausted” might decode to “I need this not to be mine to carry alone.”
- Answer what you need. Given that need, what will you say to yourself? This is the step people skip entirely, and it’s the one that determines whether you recover or carry the moment home.
That final answer matters more than any other part, because the voice you use with yourself after a hard exchange is the one that decides what happens next. You would never speak to an upset employee the way most people speak to themselves. The whole practice is simply reading your own needs the way you already read everyone else’s.
All Feelings Are Okay, Not All Reactions
The reason “focus on yourself” feels slippery is that no one tells you where the line is. Here it is: all feelings are okay. Not all reactions are.
Feeling thrown by a hostile meeting is not unprofessional. It is information. The feeling is always allowed. What you do with it is the part you govern, and the space between the feeling and the reaction is exactly where reading the need does its work. Name the feeling, find the need, choose the response. That sequence is what “taking care of yourself first” actually means in practice. It’s a half-second of reading the need before you react.
There is one more distinction that makes this usable in real time. When someone unloads on you, you can silently separate what’s theirs from what’s yours: let them have their reaction, let me choose mine. Their frustration belongs to them. Your response belongs to you. Most of what lands on HR was never actually about HR, and naming that, in the moment, is how you stop absorbing it.
Don’t Take It Personally, on Purpose
“Don’t take it personally” is usually said as a shrug, as if not caring were the goal. It’s not.
Taking it less personally isn’t a matter of caring less. It’s a matter of reading the need faster: hearing the real message under someone’s frustration, recognizing it was never truly aimed at you, and choosing your response instead of inheriting theirs. You already do this. You do it for everyone who walks through your door. The only shift this piece asks for is to turn it, finally, on yourself.
Caring deeply about others doesn’t require abandoning yourself. The same habit of reading the need that lets you do the first is what protects the second.
I would love to hear how this process works for you. If you would like to share your results or what you are noticing, please get in touch.