Taking responsibility for your life
Taking responsibility for your life, thoughts, actions and behavior is key to success and true personal development. Being personally responsible means realizing that you own your life. You are in charge of your destiny and you are the boss of your thoughts. Taking responsibility for your thoughts might be the most important step ever once you have decided not to be a victim anymore. (A victim of circumstances, of other people´s will, disease, poverty etc.)
Once you know that you are the master of your life, you need to take responsibility for yourself. And when you do, the urge to blame other people, God, life or circumstances, for your failures, will disappear. You realize that you have the power to
By this, you will gradually take full responsibility for your thoughts, actions, emotions and behaviour. This is really central for personal development and for personal responsibility.
There is great freedom in the fact that we cannot change everything we are not contented with. What we can do however is to change our own attitude and mindset. In that way, there is no reason to get upset or disappointed at things that are out of your control. This is one great way of taking responsibility for your life. Once you stop wasting time and energy on other people´s business, you focus on your own.
Consequently, there is no need to blame others. My personal development guru Wayne Dyer once said that "what other people think of me is not my business". Nobody should waste valuable time and energy on poking their noses in other people´s lives.
Being there for someone you care for does not mean taking over the responsiblilities for their lives. If you do, you are not helping or supporting, but stopping them from being personally responsible for their lives. You are the owner of your livfe, and so is everyone else.
If you have been badly treated or cheated in the past (personally, financially, emotionally, physically...) you need to accept that it happened. Yes, it happened to you. It was not OK. You hurt. It is bad and sad.
In some cases you were partly responsible too, but you did not know better then. You did not have the insight and knowledge that you possess today. So never blame yourself for things in the past. That is your responsibility right now. Yesterday is gone, today is only now. In other words, the past and the future are only perceptions of the mind. There is only the now, always. As Eckhart Tolle says: "Tomorrow is also now when it happens."
In mindfulness, there is a great focus on "here and now". As a matter of fact, nothing else exists but "now". There is this "now", there is another "now" and so on. Accordingly, it is pointless to blame yourself for things in the past. The past does not exist. If you want to be a responsible person now, you learn from your past lessons and apply them in your present life.
Being responsable is acting according to your inner voice and listen to your true self. The word means "able to respond". The opposite of taking responsibility would therefore be to follow the crowd and supress your will. If you do for an extended period of time, you will become bitter. Bitter people complain a lot and often blame others for things that are obviously their own responsibility.
Taking responsibility is simple, but not easy. But it is key to personal development and definitely key to personal success and freedom! Personal responsibility leads to self-respect which excludes the urge to blame others.
Finally an affirmation for moments of weakness (i.e. whenever you think "It is XX´s fault that I am miserable."):
I am 100% responsible for everything in my life.
Return to Personal Responsibility
Leave Taking Responsibility and return to Personal Development Home
