What is the personalization phenomenon?


The personalization phenomenon (PP) is the unconscious tendency to make everything you hear said or done about you, while remaining completely unconscious of the perceptual distortion that occurs when that happens. It’s the tendency to make yourself the star of someone else’s show, making it about you when, much of the time, it has nothing to do with you.

The personalization phenomenon occurs when there are unconscious filters distorting your perception. There will be the tendency to make automatic comparisons, draw false conclusions that engender disconnection. There is no separating or discerning between your reactions and the other’s actual experience independent of your reactions.


When you fall prey to this unconscious trap of misinterpreting a motive or projecting meaning onto the other person’s behavior and communication, you miss out on a plethora of other relevant and vital information on your face. Objectivity goes out the window when you’re looking through a lens of personalization. There’s no space to connect when you’re reacting, and you’re not conscious and connected and not acting as a separate autonomous entity. Personalization breaks the natural flow of understanding.

How can we disrupt this deeply ingrained, hard-wired, unconsciously driven personalization phenomenon – that invariably leads to misperception, faulty conclusions and disconnection?

The answer is to develop a relationship with yourself. When the source of your wellbeing and sense of self-worth are internally based, which is what happens when you have a relationship with your Self, how you feel about yourself will remain relatively constant regardless of the responses your get, however favorable or unfavorable they may be. When those blinders come off, you’ll be taking in so much more relevant and vital information, be able to engage more fully in the process, have far more accurate reads and far fewer misreads, and you will become more connectable.

Yes. Rely on the connections you make and the intimacy you create for sustenance!