 Do you feel that you're taking responsibility in your life? A lot of people tell us that we should do that and I think it's one of those concepts that we really need to re-examine because there's this typical kind of yeah I should be doing that I should take responsibility for my life but there's kind of this secretive version to it too kind of a a hesitation about taking responsibility for our lives and I think it's probably a lot of it is to do with well what do we mean when we say take responsibility for our lives now I'm going to you know talk about what I think it means to take responsibility for ourselves in life and the first thing we need to know about it is just it's kind of like a a subject or a concept that has two levels to it there's to take responsibility for your life psychological responsibility because there's this other thing of like worldly responsibility you know what the world talks about as being taken responsibility there's are you legally responsible for this you know are you professionally responsible for this these are all kind of worldly forms of responsibility and I think it's much more important to talk about psychological responsibility because that's much more of a an intimate personal choice that we make to take responsibility for our thoughts our feelings our emotions so really what I'm focused on more here is is to kind of forget this whole thing about worldly responsibility and focus more on psychological responsibility see the problem with it is in if I'm with the way the world typically thinks about responsibility here's an example you know there's an office meeting taking place and somebody barges through the door and says who's responsible for this now immediately everybody's head drops nobody's making eye contact anymore there's just dirty word called responsibility that's come in here and nobody wants to take it and that is because typically this is why we we we were hesitant around responsibility responsibility secretly means blame okay who's to blame which is why it can be a very heavy word to use in therapy or for ourselves personally when we're when we're growing and healing it's well you're saying I should take responsibility for my life are you saying everything is my fault am I to blame here and if that's the the the way we're thinking about responsibility who would want to take it okay so like I agree with that I think this is my my definition of responsibility responsibility without blame okay so you certainly responsibility is yeah I'm not blaming other people for this but I'm not going to take responsibility and then therefore start to blame myself right responsibility and blame have become unfortunately synonymous with each other and what have taken responsibility for our life means I completely take ownership of this experience but I'm not going to blame myself for that experience or for what's happened here what's actually transpiring in my life no blame whatsoever just a more of an openness and a curiosity to what's happening is much more appropriate when we're taking responsibility one of the ways to think about why we're so hesitant about this responsibility is I'll ask people this question in any given situation in life which of these two would you rather be would you rather be the victim or would you rather be the victimizer would you rather be the person who gets hurt or the person doing the hurting and most of us really do not like the idea of being the victimizer or the person who's doing the hurting so to avoid that we sometimes find ourselves attracted to being the victim in any given situation but it's really just to avoid being the bad guy quite often right it was just it's not necessarily that we want to be in victim consciousness which is cannot handle the idea that we're going to be perceived as the bad guy or the wrong person the wrong one in this situation so if we're going to actually move into responsibility in life one of the things we can think about is how is this whole victim victimizer concept or paradigm actually helping me in my life is it useful at all seeing in good and bad right and wrong victim victimizer in everything in life what if it's if it's not as simple as that or what if that's just not a helpful way to think about this a better concept i like to think about is again responsibility without blame or self-empowerment i actually i think we should be still using the word responsibility because i think it's just a word that has lost its true meaning but if you don't like that word responsibility or you have that sort of aversion to it start to say okay i'm going to i'm going to be self-empowered now i'm going to take responsibility that means self-empowerment once i take ownership of something in my life i stop this i stop seeing myself as either a victimizer or a victim no blame involved here ownership self-empowerment now i can do something about this this is kind of the the thing we're looking at here this is what we're shooting for i'll tell you just a little quick story about this what it means to kind of take responsibility to leave behind that victim victimizer thing and step into self-empowerment and it's just a little example but i remember personally a little while ago i was you never have that feeling in the morning when you wake up and you're like oh my god the world is just i have to get me today the world is imposing itself on top of me i don't want to deal with it i want it to go away i just want to stay in bed one of those types of days and you know i kind of immediately recognized okay well i might take a psychological responsibility here or am i kind of feeling a bit like a victim in this situation and of course i did feel like a victim in that situation so i could have went into what's wrong with me why am i doing this why am i a victim it's my fault that i i'm the victim which is completely wrong so what i did was okay i'm going to take responsibility without blaming myself am i a victim of this situation no is it my fault no and i start to step into self-empowerment and in self-empowerment what we can do is we can find okay well where is my role in what i'm experiencing right now and i and i came to realize you know well i feel exhausted really i don't want to handle this day self-empowerment responsibility was well why am i so tired what have i done to contribute to this tiredness not not blaming myself but i realized well you know what i haven't been to bed early for a long time maybe that's something i could look at maybe i'm contributing at the very least this experience of being the victim of this day which is imposing itself on me but as soon as i did that i began to feel less victimized by by the day because i realized i'm actually contributing to this experience did i feel bad about it no i felt good about it because now i could actually do something about this situation so taking responsibility is very liberating for us and it makes us feel less helpless and certainly less victimized by other people by the world you name it but the takeaway from this video today i want you to really take this away you know we don't go to someone who is in deep pain okay and feeling victimized we don't go and say you know you should really take responsibility because that's very cruel and we shouldn't do that we should we should see responsibility as probably the first issue most people have a responsibility or refusing to take it is that they're probably blaming themselves already secretly so responsibility see without blame every single time you use that term i'm going to take responsibility without blaming myself if we can do that we start to see solutions where we could only see problems we start to we we stop seeing the external world as this thing imposing itself on us victimizing us bullying us pushing us around and we start to feel less helplessness so responsibility without blame is the concept i'm going to take from today's video as always guys thanks a million for watching and i'll see you soon in the next video bye for now