Blame vs Responsibility

Take responsibility for your results and efforts but don’t blame yourself when things don’t turn out the way you want. 

In any circumstance, we are either taking responsibility or we are looking to place blame on someone or something. 

When the thing is positive, we call it taking credit or giving credit, when it is negative, we call it blame.

How often do you see someone succeed and hear someone else saying, see....I told him to take that shop. I encouraged her to take that course. I introduced them to each other. I, I, I.....How easy it is to "take responsibility" for things that go right for others. When they go right for ourselves many of us say, it was luck, it is all God's doing, it was meant to be. We dodge the credit, for fear of seeming too arrogant. And when it is for ourselves and shows undesirable results, we are very quick to point fingers and find something to blame, a habit we learned as kids.

As kids we are trained to blame. When the glass window is shattered, parents or maids would come running into the room to say "WHO DID THAT?" and we would all start pointing our fingers at each other, scared of punishment. Even Shaggy sang, "It wasn't me."

Taking responsibility is freeing
 while blaming is disempowering, we gave the power of it to someone or something else. We can take on an extreme perspective where we take responsibility for everything, including the weather. If you find this too challenging to take on straight away, an easy medium is to take on the perspective of being the accomplice. 

So, decide now that everything that you experience - you were an accomplice. You contributed to the situation. Taking responsibility will instantly grow your self-efficacy. You will be able to attribute your wins to your effort and abilities and you will be able to learn when things don’t go the way you planned. It also helps you to look at the whole situation and plan better, because now you are responsible for it going well.