Take Responsibility

You can take responsibility for your life without blaming yourself for it.

Those are very different experiences.

Blame can leave you beating yourself up or arguing about whose fault something was. Responsibility gives you a way to see your own power and decide what you want to do with it.

You cannot own every circumstance in the world. But you can own your experience of those circumstances: how you think, how you respond, and what you do.

That is the responsibility I want you to practice.

Own your experience of the situation

Your life is not only happening to you. You are interacting with it.

When I look at a situation I consider positive or negative, I know much of how it affects me comes from how I think about it.

That is where I own my power.

A diagnosis, an opportunity, or an interaction with another person can become something you experience yourself within, rather than something that only happens to you.

I think of life as a curriculum for discovering and choosing who we are.

We are imperfect people in an imperfect world. We can create mess and magic. Taking responsibility lets us participate consciously in that experience.

Responsibility is not permission to attack yourself

Do not use this work to blame yourself.

There is nothing useful about turning a situation into evidence that you should be beaten up.

Taking responsibility and blaming yourself involve different thoughts and different energy.

You can look at your choices and actions, understand how they contributed to a result, and stay on your own side.

That is what makes learning possible.

If you only criticize yourself, you may never evaluate why something happened or what you can do differently.

Look at what is yours before and after an event

Imagine you organize a party. Two guests drink too much, get into a fight, and frighten everyone.

You could spend the rest of the day blaming them and feeling sorry for yourself.

Or you could examine your thoughts and actions leading up to the event, as well as the thoughts and actions you choose afterward.

That does not mean you controlled the guests. It means there is still responsibility available to you.

The same distinction matters when navigating something difficult, such as a diagnosis and the hospital system.

It is easy to focus on what you cannot control and feel at the mercy of what is happening.

You can also look at what you can control, what you are responsible for, and the experience you want to create within the situation.

Use failure to learn

I love the idea that we are either winning or learning.

For me, failure becomes learning because I take responsibility for my part rather than only blame someone else.

If I simply blame another person for what went wrong, I miss what I could learn.

If I blame myself by attacking myself, I also miss the evaluation.

Responsibility lets me ask why the result happened and see the relationship between my choices, actions, and results.

Even when I am not where I want to be, recognizing my own agency gives me power to move.

Keep taking responsibility when someone blames you

This can become harder when the other person is blaming you.

You may think you are taking responsibility, so they should do the same.

But they may not be interested in this work. They may want to blame you for the very thing you could blame them for.

When someone comes to me blaming me for their failure, I try to have compassion. I understand the impulse.

I can also see how much power they are assigning to me and how powerless they feel.

My job is not to make them adopt my approach before I use it myself.

I can continue taking responsibility without blaming myself, blaming them for blaming me, or letting their criticism become a reason to attack myself.

Find the part you can own

When I studied Byron Katie's work, one practice that stayed with me was looking for the small part of a criticism that was true.

I can usually find something.

I can understand why someone might see the situation that way. I can see something I could have done better or something I can learn.

That requires me to look at my own judgments and projections instead of only examine theirs.

It can feel counterintuitive when I want to defend myself.

But finding my part gives me something useful to work with.

You can still set a boundary, tell the person what you think, or choose not to spend time with them. Taking responsibility does not require giving up those choices.

Expect to notice resistance

I recently described a situation in which people were blaming me after some interactions we had.

My first impulse was to blame them and criticize them in my mind. Then I wanted to blame myself and criticize myself.

It took time to move through that.

I eventually asked where I was responsible and what I had created that contributed to the situation.

I found it.

That did not happen instantly. You may also notice defensiveness, shame, resistance, or a desire to disconnect.

Notice those responses. Take a breath and become willing to look.

Keep reminding yourself that you are on your own side.

Review both the good and the bad

Make an inventory of things you consider good and bad that have happened in your life.

For each one, ask where you can see your responsibility.

Include the positive experiences because many of us do not give ourselves enough credit for what we have created.

The same agency is involved in creating positive and negative results: thoughts, feelings, actions, and results as we interact with the world.

Seeing that in your past can help you recognize it in the present and future.

Old arguments that no longer feel charged can be especially useful. It may be easier to see your part once you are no longer emotionally caught up in the conflict.

Use your power for yourself

Responsibility may bring up uncomfortable feelings. It can also bring compassion, gratitude, and a sense of power.

You are looking for what you can own so you can learn, make decisions, and keep moving.

Do not turn the exercise into a case against yourself.

Use it to connect with yourself, the other person, and your life.

You do not need someone else to stop blaming before you can choose responsibility. You do not need a perfect situation to see what is yours.

Stay on your side. Own the power available to you. Then decide how you want to use it.