If You Don’t Take Responsibility For Your Life - Who Will?

Posted on 26 June 2007

Something that many of my life-coaching clients have difficulty getting their head round is the area of personal responsibility. There are those people (fewer than you might expect in my experience, although I guess they would never hire a life coach so that may be a part of it) that see all their problems as being other peoples fault or simply bad luck. Then there are those people that think they have a certain level of responsibility for their lives but luck and other external forces come into play and finally those that believe that they have total responsibility for their lives.

I sit firmly in the latter group and I will tell you why.

The moment we fully embrace the belief that we are personally responsible for everything that ever happens to us is the moment we take control of our own destiny. Any other belief abrogates responsibility and removes choice. It also allows us when we encounter problems to shrug our shoulders and think that it’s outside forces at work again and there is little or nothing that we can do about it. That belief becomes a limiting belief and will only ever serve to hold us back and make us feel helpless.

Taking personal responsibility does not mean that if it rains it is your fault but if that rain it puts you in a bad mood it is.

It’s not your fault if you work for a jackass (although I guess you could leave) with all the tact of a horny bull in a pottery shop staffed by nubile young cows, but it is your fault if some careless remark aimed your way gets you down and ruins your weekend.

Ok stop, stop!

I need to interject here because I have just re-read the first bit and I don’t like the tone of my voice at all, I sound a bit high and mighty.

Let’s dump that word fault and also blame, guilt, error and any other similar ones that you or your thesaurus can think of because somebody accepting personal responsibility rarely uses such words.

This is the key to al this in my humble opinion and it is your choice to take it or leave it.

Personal responsibility NEVER means beating yourself up and It NEVER means giving yourself a hard time…EVER!

People that really get this accept when they have made a mistake, they learn from it and move on. They know it is how they grow as a person and that there is never any value in running mistakes in an endless loop through their mind progressively feeling worse and worse about it.

How much better would you feel if you got up each morning knowing that you were capable of creating the life of your dreams and nothing could stop you? How much better would you feel if you could mess up from time to time and laugh about it as well as learn from it? How much better would you feel if you knew you were immune from the opinions of others?

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