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Paul Getty once said: “The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might and force of habit. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him; and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.”
Brain Tracy believes that your ability and willingness to discipline yourself to accept personal responsibility for your life are essential to happiness, health, success, achievement, and personal leadership. “Accepting responsibility is one of the hardest of all disciplines, but without it, no success is possible.”
The failure to accept responsibility and the attempt to impose responsibility for things in your life that make you unhappy onto other people, institutions, and situations completely distort cause and effect, undermine your character, weaken your resolve, and diminish your humanity. They lead to making endless excuses.
FROM CHILDHOOD
TO MATURITY
When you are growing up, from an early age you become conditioned to see yourself as not responsible for your life. This is normal and natural. When you are a child, your parents are in charge. They make all your decisions. They decide what food you will eat, what clothes you will wear, what toys you will play with, what home you will live in, what school you will attend, and what activities you will engage in during your spare time. Because you are young, innocent, and unknowing, you do what they want you to do. You have little choice or control.
As you grow up, however, you begin to make more and more of your own decisions in each of these areas. But because of your early programming, you are conditioned unconsciously to feel that someone else is still responsible for your life, that there is still someone else out there who can or should take care of you.
Most people grow up believing that if something goes wrong, someone else is responsible. Someone else is to blame. Someone else is guilty. Someone else is the villain and they are the victim. As a result, most people make more and more excuses for the things in their lives, past and present, that make them unhappy.
If your parents criticised you or got angry with you for mistakes you made when you were growing up, you began to unconsciously assume that somehow you were at fault. If your parents punished you physically or emotionally for doing or not doing something that pleased or displeased them, you felt inferior and inadequate.
When your parents withheld their love to punish you for not doing something they demanded, you might have grown up with deep feelings of guilt, unworthiness, and un-deservingness. All these negative feelings could then intersect to make you feel like a victim, like you were not responsible for yourself or your life once you became an adult.
The most common feeling that we have as adults if we have been raised in a critical home environment is the feeling that “I am not good enough.” Because of this feeling, we compare ourselves unfavorably to others. We think that other people who seem to be happier or more confident are better than us. We develop feelings of inferiority. This can become an emotional trap.
THE FATAL FALLACY
If we think for any reason that others are better than us, we unconsciously assume that we must be worse than they are. If they are “worth more” than we are, we assume that we must be “worth less.” “This feeling of inadequacy or worthlessness lies at the root of most personality problems in our lives as well as most political and social problems in our world, both nationally and internationally.”
To escape from these feelings of guilt and worthlessness that have been instilled in us as the result of destructive criticism in childhood, we lash out at our world, other people, and situations. In any part of our life with which we are unhappy or discontented, our first reaction is to look around and ask, “Who is to blame?”
Most religions teach the concept of sin, which states that whenever something goes wrong, someone is to blame. Someone has done something bad. Someone is guilty. Someone must be punished. This whole idea of guilt and punishment leads to ever-increasing feelings of anger, resentment, and irresponsibility.
ELIMINATING
NEGATIVE EMOTIONS
The common denominator of all people is the desire to be happy. In its simplest terms, happiness arises from the absence of negative emotions. Where there are no negative emotions, all that is left is positive emotions.
Therefore, the elimination of negative emotions is your great business in life if you truly wish to be happy. There are dozens of negative emotions. Although the most common are guilt, resentment, envy, jealousy, fear, and hostility, they all ultimately boil down to a feeling of ANGER, directed either inward or outward. Anger is directed inwardly when you bottle it up rather than expressing it constructively to others. Anger is directed outwardly when you criticise or attack other people.
Negative emotions are the major causes of psychosomatic illness. This occurs when the mind (psycho) makes the body (soma) sick. Negative emotions, especially as expressed in the form of anger, weaken your immune system and make you susceptible to colds, flu, and other diseases. Uncontrolled bursts of anger can actually bring about heart attacks, strokes, and nervous breakdowns.
Here is the great discovery: All negative emotions, especially anger, depend for their very existence on your ability to blame someone or something else for something in your life that you are not happy about.
It takes tremendous self-discipline to refrain from blaming others for our problems. It takes enormous self-control to refuse to make excuses. It takes tremendous self-discipline for you to accept complete responsibility for everything you are, everything you become, and everything that happens to you. Even if you are not directly responsible for something that happens, like rainstorms, you are responsible for your responses, for what you do and say from that moment forward. It takes tremendous self-mastery for you to take complete control of your conscious mind and deliberately choose to think positive, constructive thoughts that enhance your life and improve the quality of your relationships and results. But the payoff is tremendous.
THE ANTIDOTE TO
NEGATIVE EMOTIONS
The fastest and most dependable way to eliminate negative emotions is to immediately say, “I am responsible!” Whenever something happens that triggers anger or a negative reaction of any kind, quickly neutralize the feelings of negativity by saying, “I am responsible.”
The Law of Substitution says that you can substitute a positive thought for a negative one. Since your mind can hold only one thought at a time, when you deliberately choose the positive thought, “I am responsible,” you cancel out any other thought or emotion at that moment.
It is not possible to accept responsibility and remain angry at the same time. It is not possible to accept responsibility and experience negative emotions. It is not possible to accept responsibility without becoming calm, clear, positive, and focused once more.
As long as you are blaming someone else for something in your life that you do not like, you will remain a “mental child.” You continue to see yourself as small and helpless, like a victim. You continue to lash out. However, when you begin to accept responsibility for everything that happens to you, you transform yourself into a “mental adult.” You will see yourself as being in charge of your own life, and no longer a victim.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, people who are having problems with drinking attend meetings with others going through the same situation. What they have found is that until the individual accepts responsibility for his problems, both with alcohol and in other areas of life, no progress is possible. But after the person accepts responsibility, everything is possible. This is true with almost every difficult situation in life in which you project your unhappiness onto other people or factors outside yourself.
BY CAPT SAM ADDAIH (RTD)
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