What may you ask is the 100 percent rule?
As Jim Rohn says, you must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstance, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself.
Too often we tend to blame people or circumstances outside of ourselves when something is not going right in our lives. We do this to avoid looking at the part we have had to play in getting us to this point.
The problem with doing this, is that it puts us in one of three disempowering archetypes:
The victim – where we complain, bitch and moan about how bad our lives are and if only we got the break we needed, life would be perfect and happy
The martyr – where we always do things for others, or stay that extra hour at work, or work through our lunch break, or drop everything at the drop of a hat to please someone else
The bitch – where we put the blame on others for everything and become aggressive in our behaviour and lash out at others.
Which one do you resonate with most? I have most definitely reverted to all three at one time or another in my life and most recently I’ve been in victim mode a lot.
The thing is that until we start looking inwards we will continue in these patterns of behaviour and life will not be much fun.
If we want to be successful and happy, we have to take 100% responsibility for everything we experience in our lives. Everything!! Our mindset, our achievements, the results we produce, the quality of our relationships, our health, our money story and our debts.
The first step is giving up all of our excuses, now I know this is a tough one but reverting back to excuses is bringing out our inner victim and when we are in this archetype, it is very hard to see a way out of our problem.
Take for example a situation or event in which your partner is just not seeing your point of view, you can’t seem to stop arguing over silly things. Your thoughts are: “it’s his fault, why can’t he see it my way, can’t he see I am in pain and just need his support, why does he always do this”
Can you see that these are disempowering thoughts and you are blaming somebody outside of yourself?
Your response is to yell at him or storm out the room or cry.
The outcome is you both end up in a bad mood and don’t talk for a day.
So the event + your response = your outcome
Every OUTCOME we experience in our life is the result of how we have RESPONDED to an earlier EVENT in our life.
If we don’t like the outcomes we are currently getting, we can do two things:
We can blame the event for our outcome, in other words everything external to ourself
OR
We can change OUR response to the event until we get the OUTCOME we want.
So how do we change our response?
- By changing our thinking
- By changing our communication
- By changing the pictures we hold in our head (our images of ourselves and the world)
- By changing our behaviour
Because the crux of it is, the above four things are ALL we really have control of anyway.
Taking 100 percent control of our life means giving up blaming others for our circumstances and taking control of them by changing our responses to our circumstances.
After all we are the ones who thought the thoughts, created our feelings, made the choice, said the words and is why we are where we are today.
The great news is if we don’t like where we have landed, we have the choice and ability to change it.