Many years ago I was grateful to have attended a presentation by a motivational speaker from Australia named Amanda Gore.  One of the biggest things I took away from her energetic talk was her analogy of the sack of potatoes! 

She encouraged her audience to create a visual of how we carry around a sack on our back and every time someone we know or even someone we don't know drops a comment, an opinion or an action that offends us or makes us feel bad about ourselves, it's like they are dropping their own potatoes. Instead of acknowledging that the potato has nothing to do with us and actually stems from the values and experiences of the person who dropped it, we pick it up anyway and we choose to put it in our sack.  After picking up other people's potatoes and carrying them around for a lifetime in the form of limiting self beliefs, remorse and guilt, eventually our sack becomes so heavy, we are hunched over, depleted and resentful. 

We can simply choose to drop the sack.