Do You Take 100% Responsibility for Your Life?

When I started my personal training business over 16 years ago, I read many personal development and motivational books to help me stay focussed and keep moving forward, especially when faced with new challenges.

One of the books that I used a lot during that time was The Success Principles by Jack Canfield.

The first principle is to take 100% responsibility for your life. In order to do this, you have to give us all complaining and blaming. That’s a big one. In any given day, many of us complain or blame others quite a bit.

During the course of your day, notice how often you complain, and then think about the fact that you’re almost always complaining to the “wrong person”. If you don’t complain today, that’s awesome!

When we complain, we are often talking about something we don’t like about someone else or something someone did to us. No change is actually possible when we do this.

In order to facilitate change, we need to talk directly to the person we have the issue with and try to come up with a solution, or at least let them know how we feel so that we can work on letting go of the negative emotions we have.

It’s much easier to talk about someone who made us angry or hurt our feelings than to go directly to the source and talk to them, yet nothing ever really changes when we talk about other people behind their backs.

We might feel better for a little while when we complain, but ultimately we feel worse because we’re not really being true to our authentic nature and we’re creating more stress for ourselves.

We know that if we internalize our stress, this has negative repercussions to our physical health, yet we’re all guilty of it sometimes. Avoiding is often easier than confronting a challenging situation head on.

It can be very gratifying and empowering to start taking 100% responsibility for your life. When you’re not complaining or blaming other people for the things you don’t like about your life, you’re able to actually take steps to change them.

If it’s not possible to change something, you can also work on accepting it. Either of these scenarios allows you to live in love rather than fear.

Almost all negativity is fear-based when we really get down to it. We all feel fear, but how we react to it defines the type of person we become.

Feeling fear and moving forward anyway is really scary and also creates a wonderful sense of accomplishment once you get to the other side of it.

You expand and grow as a result and also build a bank of successes that you can draw from the next time you’re feeling wary about something. You know that you can ultimately accomplish anything you set your mind to because you’ve already done it in the past.

If you’re interested in expanding your accomplishment bank, start out small and and do one thing that scares you

Action Steps:

• Notice how often you complain or blame others during the course of a day.

  If you want a different outcome, you have to do something differently.

• Allow yourself to work on giving up your complaining and blaming and instead work on

  • accepting the differences of the people around you, and

  • trying to talk clearly to people you think might be receptive to hearing your concerns when they come up.

Some people will have no interest in hearing you and you’ll have to work on accepting your differences in these cases. Acceptance and love have been referred to as synonyms. It’s a good thing to accept something when we can’t change it. It strengthens our practice of “letting go”.