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| We always have the power to choose how we interpret a given situation and the mindset we adopt in response..... |
Responsibility is not the same as accountability.
Responsibility is probably a good thing for companies and their cultures, but accountability is actually somewhat more problematic.
Accountability is, of course, an idea very much in vogue these days.
People in companies and even schoolchildren are supposed to be held accountable for their decisions and actions—what they do has consequences, and they must feel those consequences, be they positive or negative.
There is a lot of evidence, however, that the growing emphasis on individual accountability—something, by the way, that is completely inconsistent with the lessons of the quality movement—hinders learning and even discovering mistakes...
Some principles of transformation to support the change process from a 'Victim Mindset' to a 'Being Responsible Mindset' are.......
Accepting personal responsibility
So much has already been written about this subject.
Yet I continue to be amazed at how many people still think that responsibility = blame.
One might even be tempted to wonder if maligning responsibility this way is not another tactic to make people think that being responsible is a bad thing and to be avoided at all costs, thus perpetuating the victim consciousness that keeps people powerless....
Responsibility refers to....
* A structure of interpretation by which I choose to stand 100 percent as the cause of what happens in my life
— no exceptions
— including my thoughts, feelings, actions, interpretations and resulting events.
* Authorship.
It is to be aware of creating one’s self, one’s destiny, life predicaments and outcomes and, if such be the case, one’s own suffering.
* It is not the truth, like a fact.
It is a context from which one chooses to live. It starts with the willingness to come from a point of view that you are the cause of your own actions, no one can make you do anything.
You are the cause of what you have and what you are.
But you might wonder.....:
Why choose to be 100 percent responsible?
What’s the point?
Why take on such a burden?
Isn’t that heaping a lot of weight on one’s shoulders?
Isn’t it a set up for failure?
In a transformed understanding of responsibility we learn that it is not burden, fault, praise, blame, credit, shame or guilt.
In responsibility, there is no evaluation of good or bad, right or wrong.
There is simply what happens and the willingness to hold yourself accountable for how you respond.
(Ellis has been my 'chosen mentor' on this for many years, in coining it as 'Rational vs Irrational' thoughts/actions..)
Accepting personal responsibility is to claim yourself as the uncontested author of your life.
Even though much of what happens in life is beyond our ability to control, what we do have is the ability to choose how we’ll respond to what happens.
So if you want to have a say about who you are and what your life is for, responsibility is a requirement. It is the foundational principle of transformation. Without it, all the rest are null and void.
Why choose to be 100% responsible?
Because it is the key to accessing your personal power, freedom, creativity, aliveness and passion.
You can’t be kind of, or somewhat responsible.
You either are or you’re not.
No one else can make you be responsible, nor can you impose it on another.
Responsibility is a gift you can only give to yourself, like a blessing.
All of us have had things happen to us in ways that had us feel, either for a moment or perhaps for a lifetime, that we were a victim in that circumstance.
Life isn’t always fair.
Victim events DO happen......
Airplanes crash, earthquakes happen, people rob, steal, cheat and take advantage of others well-intentions.
No one gets through life without many moments of feeling like what just happened shouldn’t have happened. Feeling like what just happened wasn’t your fault, you didn’t deserve it, you weren’t to blame.
We all have stories and battle scars from the victim wars we’ve waged, and we’ve gathered a lot of evidence to be right about our stories.
We enlist our friends in giving sympathy or extra attention because of what happened to us.
We use our victim stories as excuses for (fill in the blank…) not getting on with life, not taking risks, not being in a relationship, not trusting, not loving ourselves, etc.
At the factual level, all that may be true.
But in between what happens to us and the stories we tell ourselves about it there is a tiny gap.
Maybe it’s only a millisecond.
In that gap lies the possibility that we can consciously choose our response.
And in that choice lies all the power and freedom human beings could possibly want.
Just ask Nelson Mandela or Viktor Frankl, both of whom suffered years of imprisonment and physical and psychological abuse at the hands of 'their masters'.
Frankl was in a Nazi concentration camp during WWII, Mandela imprisoned for 26+ years in South Africa.
Yet upon release, each spoke about how the power of choice helped them not only survive what had happened, but emerge from their experience, not angry and embittered or victimized, but empowered to make a difference by helping others to see within themselves the source of their own true power.
Not everything is great about being responsible; it is, for instance, hard work and can feel burdensome.
Feeling responsible also has many positive emotions and advantages associated with it, including feeling more powerful and more connected.
The point is not to have people necessarily come to believe one way of thinking is better than another.
The objective is to have people recognize that each of us has a choice—or actually a series of choices—we make each day about how we approach the world and the problems and opportunities it presents to us.
We can be victimized or responsible.
In a similar fashion, we can choose how we view opponents and rivals and we can choose what assumptions we make and hold about people and organizations and their capabilities and potential...
Each choice has consequences—for how we feel and, more important, for what we do, the decisions we make, and how we act in the situations we confront.
This isn't to suggest that we should always make the best of bad situations--there are times in life when we truly are victims of circumstance, and trying to hold ourselves responsible is counterproductive.
But in almost all 'professional' situations we can choose to adopt a responsible mindset or a victim mindset--and that choice will have a significant effect on our ability to contribute to a desirable outcome.
The responsibility to create a world that embodies the principles of transformation is ours.
If we accept that responsibility as a gift and a blessing instead of a burden, we can be empowered to move freely in the direction of the promise of this time.
It is choice we make for ourselves to live in this way, or not.
The mantle is there to be picked up.
The choice to do so or not lies within each of us.
For if the 'Great Awakening' is to occur, it will be a team sport.
And it begins in taking responsibility for inviting yourself to be on the team.
Are you in?
"Therefore comfort one another with these words"
MARANATHA and SHALOM!
1 Thessalonians 4:18
