Radical Responsibility
A constant theme I touch on in my blogs is that life is hard. It truly is. It’s a universal truth that must be acknowledged so that we see things as they really are. If we don’t, we can’t make the best decisions as we are plugging the wrong things into life’s equation. Living in a state of illusion will protect you from many of life’s pains, but it won’t let you fully take on life and live it to the fullest either. A lot of life is figuring out harsh truths or confronting them to help us become better people and get to the next level of wherever we are trying to get to. These things are hard to do at first, but once they become discipline life gets easier. One of the hardest lessons to learn is the deeply beneficial, difficult discipline of radical responsibility.
As humans, it’s become part of our nature to shirk from responsibility. When we fall short we chose the safe thoughts of “well I didn’t have enough time” “ I was late because of traffic” “you didn’t remind me we had that meeting”. We LOVE to have scapegoats. We LOVE the comforting thought that something was out of our control. We love that people generally give us scapegoats too. Why is that? It’s because if it is out of our control, we don’t feel the weight of the failure. We can shrug it off and act like it wasn’t our fault. Maybe this is helpful sometimes, but if we practice it over the duration of our lives guess what happens? Those shrug offs creep back on us. They very slowly steal the successes and dreams we hoped to accomplish over the span of our lives. We know that deep down we could have done more, should have done more, accepted more responsibility to see our dreams come to fruition. If you have yet to see regret in someone’s eyes before passing let me tell you it’s terrifying. It’s a dark place watching someone realize they could have done more but their time is now up and those chances gone forever. That possibly also exists for us. Regret is a risk none of us should be willing to have. That’s when radical responsibility dawned on me.
Radical responsibility is accepting and taking charge of every occurrence in your life. There was an accident on the way to work? I should have woken up earlier. I didn’t get all my work done. I should have worked past 5 to get it done. Even going as far into heavy stuff... if someone cheats on you, if your girlfriend or boyfriend left you, ask yourself what is it about you that attracted that kind of person? What about you caused you to lose that person? Those are a bit harsh. Well they for sure, but less harsh than not taking control of every minute detail of your life. Every where you can look, you can look closer in your life. You’ll find places you could have been more in control to manifest your destiny. Radical responsibility is taking away the scape goats so you can see things clearly for what they are. Which is also scary. If you’re not where you want to be it’s on YOU. If you are not losing the weight you said you would it’s in YOU. If you’re failing or succeeding anywhere in life it’s on YOU. In Spider-Man they say with great power comes great responsibility, but it’s really the inverse. By taking greater responsibility you have greater power in life. You’ll know at the end that you painted your life as beautifully as the Mona Lisa or if you gave up and made a Jason Pollock(sorry dude).
How do you go about transitioning to radical responsibility? The first thing you have to do is be real with yourself. You need to confront yourself on your shit. If you’re a mental person, think of the areas you have consistently given yourself excuses- work, relationships, fitness goals, business goals, etc. if you’re a visual person write these things down. So often we are adept magicians at making our flaws disappear. It isn’t until we speak them or write them or really focus on them that we acknowledge them. They have to be acknowledged to make this change. We have to keep in our awareness these changes that we want to make.
Once you identify those areas that you have been letting the fault fall off of you get back to work. When the opportunity comes up to shirk from responsibility correct your thoughts. Instead of saying “it’s okay”, ask yourself “how do I still make this happen?” and/or “what part to play did I have in this?” These kind of questions will stimulate and train your mind in a different way than it’s used to. It’s going to look for solutions and improvements and not just a way out that ends in you not feeling guilty.