Are you responsible for what happens in your life? Pt2

A bit more about responsibility in your life. First some easy questions.

Would you agree, if I said, in general, successful people are responsible people and not victims?

Would you agree, if I said, in general, successful people make things happen and things don't often happen to them?

Do you want to be a successful person?

So you want to be a successful person and you see that most successful people are responsible people?

Then you agree that there is value in not being a victim?

Now you don't get to be both in life, you are either a victim or you are not. The choice is, you happen to life or life happens to you.

What we say and how we say it give an indication as to whether we are playing the victim game or not. The victim will say the cop wrote me a ticket. The empowered person will say I got a ticket or better yet I earned a ticket. Both will tell you why. One to complain about it, the other just to describe the event. The first example distances oneself from what happened and makes it about the officer. The second puts the blame squarely where it belongs with the receiver of the ticket.

Do you see yourself as a responsible person?

Would you like to learn to take more control of your life and to be able to better steer events towards turning out more beneficial to you?

The first step to doing that is realizing where you are currently. Out of every ten things that happen in your life, how many do you actually own up to? Out of every ten events in your life how many do you make happen and how many happen to you? On a scale of 1-10, how responsible are you for what goes on in your life? All three questions are worded differently but mean the same thing.

Take a few minutes and rate yourself. Think of your general habits and patterns. Do you find yourself often blaming other people or life in general for things that happen and saying that they happen to you? Does it rain? Or does it rain on you?

If something happens that you realize you could do something about and you choose not to, if it turns out negatively for you, that is an example of you acting like an idiot and not an example of you being a victim.

A one means you are a complete victim, with no control over your life. Everything simply happens to you whether you want it to or not. And a ten means the opposite. You take complete responsibility for everything that happens. You realize that you control what happens by how you respond and by what you choose to participate in and what you do not. A five means you have a fair amount of both in your life.

Alright, so now you have your personal responsibility rating. Now, go ask three other people that know you very well and whose opinions you trust how they would rate your willingness to take responsibility for the things that happen in your life, on a 1-10 scale.

Did those other people rate you about the same as you rated yourself?

And finally an exercise to assist you in taking more control and responsibility for the things that happen in your life.

For the next week, set aside some time at the end of each day before going to sleep, ten to thirty minutes should be enough time. During that time, think of everything that happened during the day, from the moment you woke up until the moment you start this exercise. For each thing that happened, think about and find three things you could have done to make the end result different. Find one thing you could have done to make the result better, one different thing you could have done to get about the same result and one thing you could have done to make the result worse, no matter how good or bad things actually turned out for you.

The purpose of this is to show you that there is always always always something you can do to change the outcome of events. Of course you can't change things that are in the past. But going over what has happened in the past can assist us in coming up with better ways of handling things in the future.