What do people mean when they say take responsibility?

If you're like most people, when you think of responsibility you probably attach the meaning of blame/duty/obligation/burden

If you're like most people, when you think of responsibility you probably attach the meaning of blame/duty/obligation/burden. I was one of those people. But I invite you to reconsider 🙂

Quick personal story

I became involved in the coaching industry when I was 22. I lived in London at the time and in exchange for coaching, helped with facilitating events for some coaches. 

That was the time the phrase “take responsibility” came into my vocabulary and I remember thinking “wtf does that mean?” But I pretended I got it and also went around telling people ‘You need to take responsibility for your actions’ or similar 💩.

It felt dishonest to hear that it was my responsibility to deal with the consequences of being raised by a single mum, that my patterns with men were being created by me and that I was overweight because I chose to be. I wanted to be heard, coddled and understood but my coach was “making” me feel the opposite.

I’ll spare you the details, but through various trainings and coaching that I’ve experienced, I came to relate to the word responsibility completely differently. 

When I google the word, I get:

Keywords: duty, control over sb, blame, accountability, requirement, obligation.

This is the meaning we collectively created of the word responsibility and so it makes sense to me that I would have felt slightly triggered when I was told it’s my responsibility.

A new meaning

So here’s another meaning that you can create for yourself and start relating to yourself and your world in a completely different way:

Responsibility: response-ability.

Responsibility is made up of 2 words! Responsibility is the ability to respond.

Ability to respond to anything - a traffic jam, your emotions, work colleague, natural disaster, failure… You get it. 

I notice that most of us walk around the world with a victim mindset. 

• My parents did this to me. My boyfriend cheated on me.

• My school failed me.

• The government didn’t give x to me.

• My friend lost my money.

• A drunk driver hit me and broke my leg (this could be an infinite list).

Notice that the focus above is on someone/something else. You didn’t choose this to happen, so why should you take responsibility?

Because it’s your life and you’re killing your aliveness, your essence, by relating to life as a happening to you.

A different way to relate to life

Life just is, things happen, people do what they do, the weather does what it does, and you do what you do. 

As human beings, we take an event, create a story around it and then go around complaining to other people about all the things that happened to us. Look around, that’s how most people bond!

Look, I’m not denying that bad, terrible things happen to people. And there’s a space for grieving, blaming, anger, sadness, frustration, sense of unfairness. But it’s absolutely your response-ability to respond to everything in your life!

If I’m stripped from response-ability, I’m just a meat body walking around at the effect of everything else. I feel a lack of control, a lack of agency over my own life. Is that a life well-lived?

The truth is that most things in the world we personally didn’t create (e.g. malnutrition, corruption, hunger, disease, natural disasters) nor did we choose our parents. Nor being bullied at school. Or our partner dying. Heck, we can’t even choose our next thoughts or emotion that will get triggered the next time someone cuts us off in traffic. 

But it’s the ability to respond that creates a life well-lived and leaves the world a little better than we found it. 

You have the ability to respond to anything. Use it ✨

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