Taking Charge of Your Life

stellarius (40)in #personaldevelopment • 7 years ago (edited)

Before you do anything, you have to do something else first. And before you become a great success what you have to do first, is you have to accept complete responsibility for who you are, and for everything that you become. You must accept without reservation, that you are where you are and what you are because of yourself, and if you want things to change then you must change, first.

Your thoughts determine your life, and because you're always free to choose the content of your conscious mind and your thoughts, you are always fully responsible for the consequences of what you think. Your thinking determines your attitude, your conduct and your behavior; and these factors largely determine your success or failure.

You are conditioned from infancy to believe and accept that, someone or something else is responsible for your life. When you are child, your parents take care of everything. They provide you with food, clothing, shelter, educational opportunities, recreation, money, medical attention and whatever else you need.

You grow up through early childhood in a cocoon, where you're entirely provided for by other people. You're not responsible for your food, it’s just provided. You're not responsible for your cloths, someone else just buys them for you. You're not even responsible for your basic education, you just go where are told to go and, do what you're told to do and education is provided or, done to you.

There's nothing wrong with this. It’s normal and natural that our parents provide for us during our formative years. The great tragedy is that the majority of men and women come into adulthood with a conscious or unconscious expectation that somewhere, somehow someone is still responsible for them and for their situation. And this failure to totally accept and embrace the fact that you are, completely in charge of your own life, is the source of most of the unhappiness and underachievement that you experience.

The job of your parents is to bring you into the world and raise you to the age of 18 - the age of maturity, as a fully responsible self-reliant adult, capable of, making your own decisions in your own way in life.

From the age of 18 onward however, and sometimes earlier, you are in the driver seat. You are the architect, of your own destiny.

Now whether or not your parents have succeeded in raising you as a totally self-reliant individual, from that moment onward, there is no looking back. Everything you are, everything you become from then on, is up to YOU.

In one of Tolstoy short stories, he tells about children who are told that the secret of happiness, is hidden in the backyard of their home. They will be able to find it and possess it forever, as long as they do not do one thing. The one thing that they must not do, is they must not think about a white rabbit, while they are searching for the secret of happiness.

Of course each time the children go out to search for the secret, the harder they try not to think about the white rabbit, the more they think about it, and of course, they never do find the secret of happiness.

Everyone, has a white rabbit. Sometimes many white rabbits.

These are the excuses that you use to avoid setting clear goals, and making total commitments to your success in life. You need to become a skilled thinker if you sincerely desire to fulfill your potential.

Part of being a skilled thinker, is for you to objectively analyze any mental blocks or excuses, that you may have that could be holding you back, and that you may be using as reasons, for not making progress.

Some of the most popular white rabbits that people use as excuses today are self-limiting ideas such as:

I'm too young or, I'm too old. Or, I don't have any money or, I don't have enough education or, I have too many bills or, I'm not ready yet or, I can't do it because of my boss, my children, my parents or, some other reason.

Now, what are your personal, white rabbits? What are your favorite excuses for not making the changes that you know are necessary, if you're going to achieve your goals and fulfill your dreams?

Your job is to go rabbit hunting. Rout them out and run them down. Carefully analyze them to see if they have any validity.

And here's a simple test to ask yourself:

Is there anyone anywhere with my problem or limitation, who has succeeded in spite of it?
If the answer is yes, then you know that your excuse is not a legitimate reason for not going ahead.
Whatever one person is done, someone else can do also.

Remember: excuseitis, or the, inflammation of the excuse making gland, is a disease that is invariably fatal to success.

The acceptance of complete responsibility, giving up all your excuses, is not easy. It's a very difficult and that's why most people never do it. It’s like, making a parachute jump for the first time. It's both scary and exhilarating.

When you cast free from your excuses like leaping out of the airplane, you suddenly feel completely alone. However, in a few moments, you start to feel a rush of excitement and your heart starts pounding faster, and you feel remarkably, happy and free.

As an adult, you can never give responsibility away anyway. The only thing you can give away is control.

If you try to make someone or something else responsible, you end up giving away control over your life, but you still end up 100% responsible, and in addition, you'll feel negative, or angry, or anxious, or depressed.

Self-responsibility is a key quality of the fully mature, fully functioning, self-actualizing individual.

High performers take both the credit and the blame, for everything that happens to them.

Low performers only take the credit for their successes, and they blame their failure on bad luck or, other people or, circumstances beyond their control.

Successful men and women have a strong sense of internal accountability, which extends to their work and in all other relationships. Failures, try to make others accountable.

Let me ask you something. Are you self-employed?

I asked this question to illustrate a point. Probably just few of you, less than of the 20% of people who bought this book will answer positively.

But this, is a trick question. The biggest mistake you can ever make, is to think that you work for anybody else, but yourself. We are all, self-employed; irrespective of who signs our paycheck. You, are the president, of your own, personal, services Corporation. You, are in charge. You're the boss!

The top 3% in every field look upon their company, as though it belong to them. They always see themselves as self-employed, they act, as if they own the place. When they refer to their company, they use words like we and, our, and, mine and us.

Whereas the low performers always refer to the company, as though it were something separate and apart from them, as though it were just a job with, no other meaning or significance.

We know that there is a direct relationship between how much responsibility you are willing to accept for results, and how high you will rise, in any organization of value. There is a direct relationship between your income your, status, your position, your prestige, and your recognition; and the amount of responsibility you are willing to take on without excuses for achieving the goals and objectives of your organization.

Let me ask you an easy question:
If you are employer, and you have, two people working for you – one, who treated the company as it belong to him; and another who treated it as, just a job, a, place to come from 9 to 5 each day...

Which one of these two would you be most likely to promote? Which one would you want to invest in? To which one would you give additional training? To which of the two, would you give or create opportunities for advancement?
I think the answer, is obvious.

Your attitude towards self-responsibility is one of the most important statements about yourself, and the kind of person you are. I think you can put everyone on a scale from high acceptance of responsibility, all the way down to low acceptance of responsibility or, the irresponsibility.

A highly responsible person tends to be: positive, optimistic, self-confidence, self-reliant, and self-controlled.

A person from the other end of the spectrum with an attitude of irresponsibility, tends to be: negative, pessimistic, defeatist and cynical, as well as: aimless, fearful, unsure and often, neurotic and, mentally unstable.

Thomas Szasz, the controversial psychiatrist says that: “There is no such thing as mental illness. There are merely, varying degrees of your responsibility.”

Dr. Karl Menninger of the Menninger foundation once said that: “Whereas, physical illnesses are caused by a variety of factors. Mental illness, seems to be very much of the same illness, only differing in degrees of intensity, from mild cases to the most severe.”

Self-responsible individuals tend to be both extremely healthy and positive mentally. Irresponsible individuals tend to be extremely unhealthy and negative mentally.

And this brings us to one of the most important discoveries in the history of human psychology:

There is a direct relationship between how much responsibility you accept in any area of your life, and, how much control you feel in that area.

In turn, there is a direct relationship between how much control you feel in any given area, and how much freedom you feel you have, in that area.

So responsibility, control, and a sense of freedom or autonomy, go hand-in-hand. In turn, there is a direct relationship between how much: responsibility, how much control, how much freedom and how many positive emotions you enjoy, at any given time.

In other words, there's a one-to-one relationship between how much responsibility you accept, and how much of a positive mental attitude you have overall or, how happy you are.

At the lower end of the spectrum, a person with an attitude of irresponsibility, a person who feels that he is not responsible for his life or what it happens to him, also feels either a lack of control or, out-of-control entirely. He feels that he has no ability to make any difference in his life, that he is controlled by external forces and by other people.

A feeling of lack of control leads to a feeling of lack of freedom, and a combination of an attitude of irresponsibility, lack of control and lack of freedom, leads to the experience of negative emotions.

Negative emotions are what I call the robber emotions. They are the the single sole greatest cause of unhappiness, underachievement and failure in life. Negative emotions make us physically and mentally ill, they ruin our relationships and they harm our careers. They cast a shadow over everything we do.

The elimination of negative emotions is, job number one, for the man or woman who aspires to great success and achievement. Peace of mind is the highest human good, and peace of mind only exists in the absence of negative emotions.

When I began studying this subject some years ago, I was astonished to realize that virtually all the problems that we have in life are, rooted in negative emotions of one kind or another. It became evident to me that if you could find a way to eliminate negative emotions, your life would be wonderful!

All the mental principles would begin to work in your favor, and you’d accomplish more in a short period of time than the average person accomplishes in years!

I also realized that the, failure to eliminate negative emotions would undermine all your efforts, and take much of the joy and pleasure from anything that you managed to accomplish.

It would also cause all the mental principles to work against you, and could cause you more grief and heartache in a short period of time than any external factor in your life.

The elimination of negative emotions is therefore, central to the achievement of all lasting health, happiness, success and prosperity.

The breakthrough that changed my life was the discovery that, negative emotions, are completely unnecessary and unnatural in the life of man. There is no need for negative emotions. They serve no good purpose. They are only harmful. They are the major reason why men and women fail to grow and evolve to higher levels of consciousness and character. And we don't have to have them at all if we consciously choose once and for all, to get rid of them.

Now I always thought like you probably have that, negative emotions were a normal and natural part of being a human being. I thought that just as you have positive emotions, you have, negative emotions; that they were a part of human nature to be accepted as inevitable just like the rain or the sunshine.

Then I learned that no one is born with negative emotions.

Every negative emotion that we experience as adults, we had to learn starting in childhood through of a process of: imitation, practice, repetition, and reinforcement… and since all negative emotions are learned, they can be, unlearned and we can be free of them.

Many people have a very hard time with this subject. They have experienced negative emotions for so long, that they find it difficult to accept that negative emotions are completely unnecessary, and that they can be eliminated. Of course whatever you believe with feeling, becomes your reality.

If you absolutely believe that negative emotions are a necessary part of your life then they, certainly will be, and they will remain so. On the other hand, it's easy to prove that negative emotions serve no useful purpose.

Let's look at some of the more common, easily identifiable negative emotions.

They are first of all, doubt, and fear - two of the biggest killer emotions. There are also guilt and resentment, which have a tendency to go around together like twins. Then there is envy, the root negative emotion of socialism and communism; followed closely by jealousy, that great destroyer of happiness in relationships.

There are about 54 negative emotions in total, but they all eventually boil down to and are expressed in the form, of anger. Anger is perhaps the worst of all the negative emotions. Anger is either inwardly expressed - that is you make yourself sick or, outwardly expressed – that is you, make other sick.

Had you ever been angry? How do you feel, when you're angry?

Don’t you feel as though there's a huge black blanket, thrown over your mind? You find that you can not concentrate, that your mind becomes totally preoccupied with the object of your anger. You talk furiously to yourself. The longer your anger goes on the more all-consuming it becomes, like a fire burning out of control. It can rob you of sleep, of friends, of employment. It can cause you to behave irrationally and to act in ways that make you feel ashamed and embarrassed.

Is there anything good, that come out from negative emotion?

The answer is, a definite NO.

Negative emotions tied to irresponsibility, serve no useful purpose at all. Why then do people experience so many negative emotions?

Let’s answer that by starting off with the reasons why negative emotions begin in the first place.

There are four main causes of all negative emotions.

The first cause, is justification.

Justification takes place when we justify and explain to ourselves and others, why we are entitled to this negative emotion, why we are entitled to feel angry or upset for some reason.

You can begin the elimination of negative emotions by, simply refusing to justify your negative emotions. Refuse to allow yourself the luxury of, creating all kinds of reasons why you're entitled to feel as badly as you do.

You will find that all judging of others eventually leads to some form of condemnation, and the negative emotions of intolerance and eventually anger go along with that condemnation. That's why in the Bible it says: “Judge not, that you be not judged.”

Have you ever been driving along in traffic and, been cut off by another driver? Do you notice how instantly angry you become? Even though you have never seen the other driver before and other driver is never seen you before, but you react exactly as it that driver had carefully plotted your rout in traffic and then, waited to ambush you as you came driving innocently along.

However, the instant that you stop telling yourself what a terrible driver that the other person is and just laugh it off, your anger dissipates and quickly disappears.

The second major cause of negative emotions, is identification and that is taking things personally.
You can only become angry about something to the degree to which, you can personally identify with the situation and see if it somehow, negatively affecting you or harming you in some way.

The minute that you stop taking things personally, the minute that you begin to practice a form of detachment or, what is called - dis-identification, standing back from the situation, your negative emotions begin to diminish.

Superior men and women are those who remain calm and unemotional much longer than the average person. They refuse to justify or get caught up in the heat of the moment. They refuse to take things personally but, instead look at them from the viewpoint of a detached observer. This gives them tremendous mental control and makes them extremely effective in dealing with a crisis.

The third major cause of a factor of negative emotions is lack of consideration.

We have a tendency to become angry when we feel that people are not giving us just due that, people are not respecting or recognizing us the way we feel we are entitled to be. If someone is rude to us or slights us or doesn't pay enough attention to us in a social situation, our egos become involved and injured, and we feel hurt and angry and defensive.

As a wise man once said: “You should not worry so much about what other people think of you, because if you knew how seldom they did, you would probably be insulted.”

You can begin to starve your negative emotions right now by refusing to justify and create reasons for them. By refusing to identify with them and take situations personally, and, by refusing to let the behavior of others toward you get under your skin.

But the very fastest way to eliminate them, virtually in an instant, is to go right to the root cause of negative emotions.
The astonishing fact is that 99% of your negative emotions depend for their very existence on your ability to blame someone or something else, for something that you don't like.

Blaming is the fourth and final cause of all negative emotions, and it lies at the root of almost all of them. The instant that you stop blaming, that you refuse to blame anyone or anything else for anything, your negative emotions declines at that moment.
The simple switch that you can use to short-circuit any negative emotion, is the fact that the conscious mind can only hold, one thought at a time, positive or negative, and you can deliberately choose that thought. Whenever you feel negative or angry for any reason, you can immediately cancel the thought that is causing the negative emotion by saying very firmly: “I - am - responsible”.

This is the most powerful affirmation for mental control ever discovered! The words: “I, am responsible”. “I am responsible, I, am, responsible…” instantly turn your mind from negative to positive.

They enable you to assert complete control over your emotions and make them positive. They cause you to become calm and relaxed and to see the situation with greater clarity. These words: “I, am responsible” put you in charge of yourself and make you much more capable of dealing with the situation effectively.”

Here's the critical factor:

You can develop no further in your life than you have up to this moment with your negative emotions intact.

All personal progress requires the systematic elimination of negative emotions. It’s not possible for you to grow and evolve to higher levels of consciousness, except to the degree to which you, free yourself from your negative emotions as if you are freeing yourself from the forces of gravity that are holding you in your current reality.

This acceptance of responsibility, the elimination of negative emotions is not optional. It is mandatory.

It’s absolutely essential to your health and happiness and personal effectiveness. The development of a positive mental attitude toward yourself and your life, characterized by the gradual elimination of negative emotions will enable you to start using your higher mental powers in ways, that today you cannot imagine!

As an exercise in clearing your mind, stop reading for a moment, and think over your entire life - past and present, and then, systematically analyze every single memory or situation that causes you to feel negative in any way.

Neutralize the negativity associated with the memory or circumstance by simply saying: “I am responsible. I, am responsible. I, am, responsible.”

The fact of the matter is that you, are responsible. Whatever difficulty or, problem you have as an adult, in most cases you got yourself into it.

You, are free to choose. In most cases you probably knew at the time that you shouldn't be doing it, but you went ahead anyway. So, you are completely responsible for what happened, for the consequences of your decision.

Often people ask me, is it accepting responsibility, the same as accepting blame? The answer to that is that responsibility always looks forward, always to the future. Blame, always looks backward, always looks for the person who's going to be punished or condemned.

Someone runs into your cars stop light. You are legally, not at fault, but you are responsible for the way you react to the situation. You're responsible for your conduct and your behavior. You can either, respond by becoming angry, upset and emotional; or you can, respond by being mature, and calm and controlled.

The choice, is up to you. And, everything is contained in your response, not the situation itself.

Usually when we talk about responsibility in these terms, almost everyone agrees that, from this point forward they’re going to accept complete responsibility in their lives.

However, almost every single person to whom I spoke about responsibility, has also admitted that there is at least one area in their past, when there is no way, that they're going to take responsibility. They say: “If you only knew what that other person did to me, you wouldn’t ask me to accept responsibility!”

And now I must tell you about an absolutely, critical truth. It is this:

The existence of even one negative emotion in your conscious or subconscious mind, is in itself enough to sabotage all your chances for great success.

Let me give you an example that illustrates this key point.

Imagine that you’ve been given a brand new Mercedes Benz automobile, from the factory, beautifully engineered and, perfect, in every respect. There's only one problem though, and you don't know about it.

A mistake was made in assembling the brakes, and one, front brake is locked on and cannot be released. Now, let's say that you decide to take your beautifully engineered machine for a drive. You, get in, you, start the engine, you shift into gear, and you step on the gas.

If everything in this car is absolutely perfect except that one, front wheel brake is locked on, what would happen if you stepped on the gas?

The answer is, that you would spin around that locked wheel.

The car would go around and around in the circle, and no matter how hard you stepped on the gas or, how much you twisted the wheel, you would simply go around, in a circle.

Your world is full of people who are just like that new car. They may be intelligent, good looking, well educated and seem to have everything going for them, but their lives just seem, to go around in a circle.

The reason is that they are holding on to at least one key area of their life, where they are refusing to accept responsibility. I've seen men and women 50 years old who are still angry and uncompromising over something that happened to them in their childhood.

This refusal to accept responsibility, hurts their relationships with their spouses, their children, their coworkers and their friends. It manifest itself in a variety of psychosomatic illnesses, and in extreme cases it can even lead, to early death.

There is a saying that you become, what you teach.

Once you begun accepting responsibility for every part of your life - large or small, start encouraging your friends and associates do the same thing. When people tell you about their problems and their frustrations, empathize with them briefly and then remind them that: “You, are responsible”.

Perhaps one of the kindest things you can do for a true friend, is to put him back in touch with this own good sense by, reminding him that, he, is responsible. When a person complains, simply say: You are responsible, what are you going to do about it? Don’t worry about giving advice. Someone once said that the propensity to give advice is universal, but it doesn't matter because, the propensity to ignore is equally universal.

There are lot of people who wanted to be a guidance counselor, and eventually a psychologist or psychotherapist, to help people through their problems. They would spend many hours listening to their friends and counseling them the very best ways that they could give them, their very best guidance and advice to help them deal with the difficulties.

Whenever I was involved in one of these counseling sessions, especially with friends and coworkers, I would avoid all the hours of going back and forth dissecting the problem and, simply cut to the core of the matter and say: “Well, you are responsible, huh, what are going to do about it?”

In that situations people feel that this is too simplistic, and that, I was not giving due consideration to the complexities of the various situations. They are astonished to see how many of these people after, endless counseling sessions, actually, went out and get their axed together shortly after they had been told in simple terms, that they are responsible, and that it was up to them to do something about their situation.

Now me and my friends have our joke when something similar occur. When someone have lunch with a friend who has a problem, or someone is spoken with somebody who has some personal difficulty, I ask them what he or she has told that person to do? They now reply by saying: “I just gave him or her, the advice. It is so much simpler, it work so much better, and it is much easier on everyone involved. And the advice is: You, are responsible. What are you going to do about it?”

Start to become your own psychotherapist by reminding yourself over and over again: I am responsible. I am responsible. I, am, responsible. And then by giving the advice to others, who have problems, just say:
“You, are responsible. What are you going to do about it?” Then let them get on with the rest of their lives and, you get on with yours.

Here is an action exercise for you:

Take a pad of paper and draw a line down the center. On the left side, make a list of every person or situation about which you harbor any negative feelings at all. Number each one.

On the right side of the page, write out a series of sentences that begin with: “I am responsible for this, because…” and complete the sentence.

Do this for each item, and be as hard on yourself as you possibly can. Be, brutally frank and honest. Write out every reason why you might be responsible for what happened.

Do the same for every negative emotion causing situation in your past or present. When you've completed this exercise you will be amazed at how much more positive and, in control you feel about yourself and your life.

By saying the words: I, am, responsible; your self-esteem goes up, and you begin moving, toward peak performance.

You must accept without reservation that if you want things to change, then you must change first.

In the left column, describe unhappy situations that currently exist in your life; in the right column, complete the sentence, “I am responsible for this because”

Unhappy Situation - I am responsible because
a. ________________ - ________________
b. ________________ - ________________
c. ________________ - ________________