Personal Development Key: Take Responsibility for Your Life

Taking responsibility comes with big benefits. Assess your situation and then take steps to change what doesn’t contribute to your personal success. When you take responsibility, you experience the accomplishment of your personal success goals at a much higher level than if you take credit for only your successes and blame someone else for the rest.

Taking responsibility makes it possible for you to experience the total pleasure of the success you achieve. What? Read that again. I have a feeling that you didn’t give that thought time to sink in.

To fully be responsible, you must take responsibility for the good and the seemingly bad in your life—for your positive habits as well as your negative habits.

It reminds me of how parents will jokingly or not so jokingly say when a child does something good, “That’s my boy.” And when he does something wrong, “He’s your son.”

Taking responsibility comes with big benefits. You assess the situation and then take steps to change what doesn’t contribute to your personal success. When you take responsibility you experience the accomplishment of your personal success goals at a much higher level than if you only take credit for the good that comes into your life and blame someone else for the rest.

I admit that it took me quite a while to come to terms with cutting off the excess baggage I was carrying around. I seemed quite comfortable accepting responsibility in all areas of my life except for one.

I spent almost 10 years in an abusive relationship. I thought I was well along my path of personal success and spiritual growth at that time. I only read motivational and self-help books. I listened to personal growth tapes in my car. I lived and breathed the personal development principles I learned, or so I thought.

Despite all that positive reinforcement, I was wearing blinders to this horrible situation. But it wasn’t my fault, or so I told myself confidently. Obviously it had to be his fault because look at all the evidence of how empowered I was.

And yet, there I stayed. Being beaten up physically and verbally on a regular basis. If I had told anyone, they would have been shocked.

Looking back all these years later, I have a completely different perspective. I wasn’t so innocent in all this. I played some part or it couldn’t have happened.

If I were going to take responsibility, which means having the ability to respond and adapt rather than react to situations, I would have to give myself a serious reality check.

As painful as it may be to let go of the convenience of blaming someone else for what happens in your life, it’s necessary for you to move forward and be successful.

Because while you are still blaming or holding a grudge, like I was in that situation, a lot of energy that could be used for personal development is fueling anger, resentment and fear.

Think of this excess baggage from your past as a virus on your computer. On the surface everything looks like it’s running normally, but behind the scenes something is using up energy that slows down the progress of what you’re trying to create.

You have to look deep inside your computer to find that virus. You may have to engage the services of an expert to help you work it out. It’s inconvenient, but once done, you feel much better, your computer is back to full potential and you can work quickly with results showing up faster than before.

In that abusive relationship I had to look at the fact that I allowed myself to be manipulated. I handed over my power to someone else. No matter how persuasive his verbal abuse to break down my self-confidence, in the end he couldn’t be successful without my help.

Once I became responsible, I came up with a plan. And because I was now responding and adapting to situations rather than reacting like a victim, my plan got implemented, I created the desired result and extracted myself from that relationship.

I believe I could have ended up dead if I had allowed the violence to continue. It happens to women every day and I could have been one of them.

That’s why it’s so important for you to take back your power from partners, family, friends, and the media. You may not have ever been in a situation like I was and I hope you never are.

But…

You are the only one who should be in charge of your life.

You bear the sole responsibility for who you are today and who you will become in the future— no one else is responsible for your personal growth and success.