This is one of those concepts that is so deep and so life changing that whole books can be written about it. Stephen R. Covey talks about ‘being responsible’ as the first habit of highly effective people. By the way, if you have not read Covey’s ‘The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People’ I would highly recommend it. So what does taking responsibility mean?
Well, at its core, it means to get to a point where you feel, understand, and internalize that you are responsible for your experience of life – the bad, the good, and the ugly. I would personally argue that you are responsible for all of the circumstances, events, and conditions in your life. This can be a difficult concept to explain, and much more difficult to internalize, and it also raises good questions, such as, ‘Is the child in Africa responsible for the conditions she is born into?’. But that’s a whole other discussion, which I will tackle later. For now, however, even if I say that you are not responsible for the circumstances, events, and conditions in your life, you are definitely responsible for how you perceive all those experiences and how you react to them.
Stephen Covey talks about responsibility as really being ‘response-ability’, or an ability to choose your response to whatever happens. Say you are in a traffic jam; you can be angry and frustrated, or you can be calm and relaxed. Chances are you have had both responses at one time or another, and in both scenarios your experience of that same traffic jam is very different. In other words, your ‘reality’ changes according to how you choose to respond to the situation. And this applies to every situation you may find yourself in.
Pretty powerful stuff, don’t you think?
Until next time,
V