that we almost all feel are entitled to a great life—that
somehow, somewhere, someone will be responsible for
filling our lives with continual happiness, exciting career
options, nurturing family time, and blissful personal
relationships simply because we exist. But the real truth
—and the one lesson this course/mentoring/coaching
program is based on—is that there is only one person
responsible for the quality of the life you live. That
person is you. If you want to be successful, you have to
take 100% responsibility for everything that you
experience in your life. This includes the level of your
achievements, the results you produce, the quality of
your relationships, the state of your health and physical
fitness, your income, your debts, your feelings—everyt
hing!
Now take a minute and think about what you just read.
I know this seems not easy. In fact, most of us have
been conditioned to blame something outside of
ourselves for the parts of our life we don’t like. We blame
our parents, our bosses, our friends, our coworkers, our
spouse, the weather, the economy, the government, our
astrological chart, false prophets, our lack of money—
anyone or anything we can pin the blame on. We never
want to look at where the real problem is—ourselves.
——THINK ABOUT EVERY ASPECT OF YOUR
LIFE…WHO HAVE YOU BEEN BLAMING ? List all of them.
WHY HAVE YOU BEEN BLAMING THEM
There is a wonderful story told about a man who is out
walking one night and comes upon another man down
on his knees looking for something under a street lamp.
The passerby inquires as to what the other man is
looking for. He answers that he is looking for his lost
key. The passerby offers to help and gets down on his
knees and helps him search for the key. After an hour of
fruitless searching, he says, “We’ve looked everywhere
for it and we haven’t found it. Are you sure that you lost
it here?”
The other man replies, “No, I lost it in my house, but
there is more light out here under the street lamp.” That
must have felt so ridiculous. But that is what a lot of
people do. They are looking for what is lost in the wrong
place. They do not ask the most important question
before they start searching. Think about your own life.
The things that you want badly. The things you really
want to acquire. Have you asked the most important
question before you start searching? If your efforts of
many years have been completely fruitless, you are
probably making the same mistake.
It is time to stop looking outside yourself for the answers
to why you haven’t created the life and results you want,
for it is you who creates the quality of the life you lead
and the results you produce. You—no one else! Even
when God gives you solutions. You have to be the one
to carry them out. To achieve major success in life—to
achieve those things that are most important to you—
you must assume 100% responsibility for your life.
Nothing less will do. 100% RESPONSIBILITY FOR
EVERYTHING.
——-HOW DOES THAT FEEL
Taking 100% responsibility means you acknowledge that
you create everything that happens to you. It means you
understand that you are the cause of all of your
experiences. If you want to be really successful, and I
know you do, then you will have to give up blaming and
complaining and take total responsibility for your life—
that means all your results, both your successes and
your failures. This attitude is the prerequisite for creating
a life of success. It is only by acknowledging that you
have created everything up until now that you can take
charge of creating the future you want. If you realize
that you have created your current conditions, then you
can uncreate them and re-create them at will.
YOU HAVE TO GIVE UP ALL YOUR EXCUSES
“Ninety-nine percent of all failures come from people
who have a habit of making excuses” - George
Washington Carver
If you want to create the life of your dreams, then you
are going to have to take 100% responsibility for your life
as well. That means giving up all your excuses, all your
victim stories, all the reasons why you can’t and why
you haven’t up until now, and all your blaming of
outside circumstances. You have to give them all up
forever. You have to take the position that you have
always had the power to make it different, to get it right,
to produce the desired result. For whatever reason—
ignorance, lack of awareness, fear, needing to be right,
the need to feel safe—you chose not to exercise that
power. Who knows why? It doesn’t matter. The past is
the past. All that matters now is that from this point
forward you choose—that’s right, it’s a choice—to act as
if you are 100% responsible for everything that does or
doesn’t happen to you. That should be one of the most
important things you should take away from this
program.
As from now, If something doesn’t turn out as planned,
you should ask yourself, How did I create that? What was
I thinking? What were my beliefs? What did I say or not
say? What did I do or not do to create that result? How
did I get the other person to act that way? What do I
need to do differently next time to get the result I want?
Here is a very simple but very important formula that will
make this idea of 100% responsibility even clearer to you:
The formula is: E + R = O (Event + Response =
Outcome).
The basic idea is that every outcome you experience in
life (whether it is success or failure, wealth or poverty,
health or illness, intimacy or estrangement, joy or
frustration) is the result of how you have responded to
an earlier event or events in your life. If you don’t like
the outcomes you are currently getting, there are two
basic choices you can make.
1. You can BLAME the event (E) for BLAME your lack of
results (O). This is not a good choice for you. You can
blame the economy, the weather, the lack of money,
your lack of education, racism, gender bias, the current
administration in your country, your parents, your wife or
husband, your boss’s attitude, your employees, the
system or lack of systems, and so on. No doubt all
these factors do exist, but if they were the deciding
factor, nobody would ever succeed. Let me repeat this.
All these unfavorable factors exist. But if they were the
determinant factors for how your life should turn out,
NOBODY would ever succeed.
For every reason why you think it’s not possible, there
are hundreds of people who have faced the same
circumstances and succeeded. Lots of people overcome
these so-called limiting factors, so it can’t be the limiting
factors that limit you. It is not the external conditions
and circumstances that stop you—it is you!
We stop ourselves! We think limiting thoughts and
engage in self-defeating behaviors. We defend our self-
destructive habits (such as procrastination, laziness,
excessive entertainment, inadequate personal time with
God in prayers, and hearing from God, lack of reading
and studying attitude etc.)... we defend these attitudes
with indefensible logic. That is the reason for our
problems. We ignore useful feedback, fail to continuously
educate ourselves and learn new skills, waste time on
the trivial aspects of our lives, engage in idle gossip, eat
unhealthy food, fail to exercise, spend more money than
we make, fail to invest in our future, avoid necessary
conflict, fail to tell the uncomfortable truth, don’t ask for
what we want—and then wonder why our lives don’t
work.
2. You can instead simply change your responses (R) to
the events (E)—the way things are—until you get the
outcomes (O) you want. This is the best choice. You can
change your thinking, change your communication,
change the pictures you hold in your head (your images
of yourself and the world), and change your behavior—
the things you do. That is all you really have any control
over anyway. Unfortunately, most of us are so run by our
habits that we never change our behavior. We get stuck
in our conditioned responses—to our spouses and our
children, to our colleagues at work, to our customers and
our clients, to our students, and to the world at large.
We are a bundle of conditioned reflexes that operate
outside of our control. You have to regain control of your
thoughts, your images, your dreams and daydreams, and
your behavior. Everything you think, say, and do needs
to become intentional and aligned with your purpose,
your values, and your goals.
——— IF YOU DON’T LIKE YOUR OUTCOMES,
CHANGE YOUR RESPONSES. HOW HAVE YOU NOT BEEN
RESPONDING WELL TO EVENTS OF YOUR LIFE ? WHAT
ARE SOME OF THE RESPONSES YOU THINK YOU WILL
BEGIN TO CHANGE
Let’s look at some examples of how this works. A man
lived in in Los Angeles during a terrible earthquake. Two
days later, he watched as a CNN reporter interviewed
people commuting to work. The earthquake had
damaged one of the main freeways leading into the city.
Traffic was at a standstill, and what was normally a 1-
hour drive had become a 2-or 3-hour drive. The CNN
reporter knocked on the window of one of the cars stuck
in traffic and asked the driver how he was doing.
He responded angrily, “I hate California. First there were
fires, then floods, and now an earthquake! No matter
what time I leave in the morning, I’m going to be late for
work. This sucks!” Then the reporter knocked on the
window of the car behind him and asked the second
driver the same question. This driver was all smiles. He
replied, “It’s no problem. I left my house at five A.M. I
don’t think under the circumstances my boss can ask for
more than that. I have lots of music and my Spanish-
language lessons with me. I’ve got my cell phone. I have
coffee in a thermos, my lunch—I even brought a book to
read. So I’m fine.”
Now, if the earthquake or the traffic (the event) were
really the deciding variables, then everyone should have
been angry. But everyone wasn’t. It was their individual
response to the traffic that gave them their particular
outcome. It was thinking negative thoughts or thinking
positive thoughts, leaving the house prepared or leaving
the house unprepared that made the difference. It was all
a matter of attitude and behavior that created their
completely different experiences.
Credit:
Mr. Sunday O. Akinbowale
Custodian THE GENIUS SCHOOL OF IMPACT AND
PURPOSE (GSIP)
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