For Part One of this article go here.
Here is how it works
Responsibility means that you take charge and you take control over your destiny.
Really!
It means that you have the power to create what you want and therefore you have the power to change your life. As much as you have heard this before, you’re still not doing it! You still continue to live in the same old way you always did.
I know, I know… You’re sitting there thinking: “Oh, this sounds good if it were true, but it is not my life experience!” And I will ask you then, have you actually taken responsibility hundred percent for how you experience life? The successes and the failures? Have you really? Because if you truly did – you could not think this way any longer.
So, the opposite of taking responsibility (as harsh as this may sound) is actually irresponsibility. And when you’re not responsible (irresponsible), you are at the whim of others who will be more than happy to tell you what to do, and to guide your life from the cradle to the grave. Not that they really care – what are you to them? Nothing! But they have their own agendas, in which directing your life has nothing to do with concern.
If I was going to communicate to you these thoughts, but not live my life under the same principles, I would not have made it beyond the first year in my NLP Training career. I would not be congruent. Am I happy with all the events in my own life? No, absolutely not. I lived through pretty ugly events. Do I take responsibility for them? If I want to feel really empowered, I must!
Do you get this?
If you really want to be empowered, you MUST take responsibility for everything you experienced. That puts you at the helm of your life.
Now, have you created all the bad events in your life consciously? Of course not! The combination of conscious and unconscious choices you made have put you in places where you had to experience all those things. See… you don’t have to like what happened to you. Of course not! Some people have experienced absolutely horrific things! If you do coaching enough, you hear mind-boggling things that some people do to other people….
And regardless to what happened in the past, the question remains how can you NOW, with the experience you have got, still create a full and fulfilling life as a conscious being? How can you live rather than worry and blame?
To live a full life, you need to give up hypocrisy. Saying one thing and doing something else. You have to honestly do your best to do what you advocate. So, it is your free will and choice what life you live.
If your belief is to be in charge of your life and live it to the fullest potential, this implies your fullest potential. And if you undoubtedly believe this, your mental path will lead you there.
But when blame becomes the centerpiece of your life, you soon discover that there is no end to it. Endless blame slowly eats up your choices and will. Endless blame creates needy people – like a special needs child, stuck to your hip. Only that a special needs child has an excuse; you don’t!
Be A Victim If You Like
And since I believe in free will and free choice, I also must defend the right of people to stay on a path where they blame others and feel victimized by them. They have the free will to be victims.
If you don’t grasp this much, you have no business complaining that you have too many worries. If you take your inner power from others’ taking care of your needs – and then you blame them for not doing enough for you, or giving you enough of what you want – you are missing the point.
When you blame someone else and refuse to take responsibility for your life, you are actually giving away the power to others on the outside. The ones on the “outside of you” who have their lives and their interests. These are the people who hide behind a curtain of platitudes – “Oh, you poor thing! they say, And isn’t too bad that you’re such a victim! You are a victim, but you have no hand in creating this in your life! “They” did it to you!”
They will say that, and you will feel all warm and fuzzy because finally somebody understands you. NOW, somebody understands your pain.
Well forks, your pain is real, but somebody else really understanding it … that’s another issue. “They” don’t. “They” have their own agenda. “They” have their own “pains” to deal with.
The only thing that has the potential to get you out of your pain is to learn the meaning of it. in Time Line Therapy® we call that the learnings. I would recommend you read Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. There, you will see atrocities and pain. You will see human suffering. But you will also see there
“…the importance of finding meaning in all forms of existence, even the most sordid ones, and thus a reason to continue living.”
I would also recommend to you that you read Time Line Therapy and the Basis of Personality by Tad James et al.
It will be enlightening.
But what if “they” really did it to you?
We’ll see this in our last part of the article….