Take Responsibility

Why do so few people take responsibility for their own lives? Your life, your very existence, is bounded by responsibility. You have responsibility to your job, to your family, to your pets, to your community. People coast along hoping (and often praying) that things will work out just fine without actually putting in any time or effort to change their situation, fix a recurring problem, or account for the unexpected emergency.

If you should lose your job you commence preferably at once looking for another. But why weren’t you looking for a job when you didn’t need one?

You have a financial emergency of a few hundred or few thousand dollars. But where are your plans or financial assets to alleviate any discomfort it may bring you?

Taking responsibility for even the smallest fraction of our lives allows us to control that part, and ultimately the recognition for every aspect of our existence. By being in command of one area we learn we can control and direct other regions. We become self sufficient and able and capable of weathering the storms that life brings our way.

Why take responsibility?

Assuming responsibility allows us to get what we want, rather than meekly accepting what is given to us.

Assuming responsibility allows us to prevent others from seizing what we have and only enables them to receive that which we concede.

Assuming responsibility lets us set the course of our own lives as to how we dictate it should be, rather than becoming a rudderless ship on a vast ocean of possibility.

We cannot steer a course to our goals if we cannot control ourselves and our life and our environment. Control of ourselves allows us to determine what we want. Control of our life allows us to get what we want. Control of our environment allows us to keep what we have.

Your life, and all that you have acquired, good and bad, is a direct result of what you have given yourself or allowed to be given to you.

As I have repeated too many people I’ve met: “You live the life you give yourself.”

Broken relationship? You picked it. And you allow it to continue.

Badly paid job with no prospects? You signed up for it. And you continue to show up, day after day.

Deep in debt? You paid for it. And you’ll be paying for it for a long time to come.

You can fix all of these problems by applying tools and techniques that will make you a better person who is able to control your own environment and the misfortunes and fortunes that come your way. The problem is we aren’t given these tools and techniques and the skills to use them when in school or in our regular home life. For those people that do gather the necessary skills they are usually self-educated and self-taught.

The sad aspect is that for most people you meet in life, they will never acquire these skills.

They will go blindly through life never knowing.

We are all hoping for a fortune to land in our laps and we are all dismayed by misfortune when it does. But what we don’t realize is that both of these events, fortune and misfortune are directly a result of our actions and inactions and how we respond. Very few things in life are beyond our control.

When you take a single step towards embracing personal development you have become a better human. You become more than what you are. Almost the entire population is terrified of taking even a single step, paralysed by fear of the unknown, paralysed by the spectre of failure.

You have to understand that you cannot fail.

Nobody is going to get hurt. Nobody is going to jail.

You can acquire and become all that you desire simply by knowing these small facts. You must know them deep down. It is your mantra that you live by. Any setback you experience, any temporary problem you encounter is just that, completely temporary. Setbacks and temporary problems are not to be thought of as failure.

The easiest skill you can acquire right now is this: You learn from your mistakes, you learn from the misfortunes and fortunes you receive, you consider them lessons in how to do it better the next time. But so long as you do not ever give up on what you are attempting to achieve you cannot fail.

Most of us go through our days thinking that we are taking responsibility for ourselves and our lives. We go to work, we go to school, we pay our bills, and we take our car to the garage when it needs an oil change. Our culture considers this the epitome of responsibility. But what we are doing is the most basic things necessary to integrate ourselves in to the social fabric. We are living a life of mediocre responsibility. Very few of us decide to actively engage life and all that it entails. We must embrace responsibility for our lives to grow beyond our current limited horizon.

Ignoring responsibility can have dire consequences. If we ignore the responsibility of paying our utility bills, our water, power and gas are shut off. If we ignore the responsibility of paying our rent, we get evicted. If we ignore the responsibility of showing up and doing our job, we get fired. And finally, if we ignore the responsibility of feeding ourselves correctly we become obese, suffer heart disease and diabetes and other ailments, and finally die a painful death. These are major areas of our life that we can take responsibility for. Some of them we take responsibility for by default, i.e. paying bills, because the pain of not doing so is greater than the financial cost. It is pain, an external motivator, which forces us to take responsibility for parts of our life. But we can also take responsibility for those aspects of our lives that we generally tend to ignore, our financial future, our medical care, our health, our diet, our consumption of information and ideas. It is these areas that will have the greatest impact on our lives when we do assume responsibility for them

When we take responsibility for ourselves and our lives, we have the opportunity to have a say in how we as a person actually live. We have a say in what opportunities we pursue and which ones we reject. We have a say in what happens to us, how we live, the possessions we acquire, the job we have, and how people perceive us and treat us.

Taking responsibility for something is not a singular act to be performed once and then forgotten. By examining our actions and our deeds continuously, by living consciously, by asking the five essential W questions of personal development “Why? Why? Why? Why? And why?” are we all able to get to the root of what we do and why we do it. Figuring out why we do something is the conscious part. At that point we can either decide to keep doing it, being consciously aware of the act, or we can decide to stop doing it. Either way, we’ve taken responsibility for it.

The act of asking “why” five times drills down through the objections and flawed reasoning of why we don’t, didn’t, or can’t do the very thing we should have done to prevent the problem occurring, prevent the problem reoccurring, and to never allow the problem to exist in the first place.

Asking “why” five times and giving honest answers is usually ample to get to the true cause of the problem. Sometimes you will get to the root in only three questions, and sometimes you will have to ask “why” a whole lot more. Be like a child, and ask “why?” until you have a satisfactory set of answers to whatever the area of your life it is you are attempting to control.

This one simple technique is a foundation skill for all future personal development.

Enjoy the child within and start questioning everything about your life.