PRINCIPLES
FOR PERSONAL GROWTH, CHANGE, AND TRUE
SUCCESS
IN OUR LIFE AND SERVICE TO OTHERS
How
to become all we can be and live at peace in our
world.
Principle
2 - We need to assume full responsibility for our
lives, our performance, our relationships, and how we
respond to what happens to us.
As a performance coach, we often say “We help people
accept full responsibility for improving their personal
and organizational performance.” Fundamental to
long-term success and peace of mind is the acceptance
of responsibility for our performance and our
relationships. There is one commentator, who on a
note of whimsy said, “Maturity comes when you realize
that the cavalry isn’t.” He means that we are
only fully mature when we accept the possibility and
embrace the opportunity that nobody will come to save
us. The cavalry is not coming; we are responsible
for removing ourselves from our own situation, or
improving the situation in which we find
ourselves.
Years ago, the old stoic philosophers in Rome pointed
out that we had to be fully in control of our lives and
take charge of the destiny we desired. Later on,
the old romantic poem said, “I am the captain of my
soul.”
All of this can lead to a certain rugged individualism
that has no sense of responsibility to others or to a
profound arrogance about our own possibilities.
That is not to be embraced; indeed, it is to be
avoided. But what this principle affirms is that
we indeed must accept the responsibility for not only
what comes our way, but what we make of what comes our
way.
A strong point of order and emphasis should be
made. We do not mean by this that we are to blame
for all of the things that we have received or that
have come to us. The universe is fully of
tragedy, misfortune, and, there are circumstances that
we do nothing to bring upon ourselves. This
principle does not believe that there is a certain
karma to it all. But what we do insist is that no
matter what comes to us, we, through service to others,
the affirmation of our own spirit, the language that we
use, and the responsibility that we assume can create
to a large extent the destinies that are before
us. We are not to blame for what we have
received, but we are responsible for how we
respond. The motivational speaker is partly right
when he says, “If it is to be, it is up to
me.”
It has been noted that many men and women of times past
sought a way to leave an endowment
to the world and to others. Today it seems that
most people seek a way to get an
entitlement from others. We are overwhelmed
with the amount of litigation in our culture that is
symptomatic of the “I am a victim” mentality way of
thinking. We think we deserve something, and we
have a right to something. But what is true is
that we only have the right to serve others and to
create value for ourselves and
others.
It has been noted that the power of confession, which
has long been lost both in religious and legal terms,
is the powerful acceptance of moral
responsibility. To confess is to make us more of
a human being, we are uplifted as men and women when we
confess what we have done wrong and what we are
responsible for. It is the mark of the man or
woman who bears with them moral
responsibility.
All of this comes down to one of the principles for
effective and successful living. We do not seek
the salvation of our situation from any external
source, nor do we ask others to make our situation
better. We need
to assume full responsibility for our lives, our
performance, our relationships, and how we respond to
what happens to us. To live otherwise is not to
live as full human beings.
Stan
Hustad
PTM Group