“Today, I take full responsibility for my own life. Following today, my future is my responsibility alone, no one else’s. Possibilities and horizons open when I take responsibility for the results.”
That’s a slightly modified affirmation I came across recently. Whether you use it as a daily affirmation or simply adopt it as one of your core beliefs, this is an incredibly powerful idea if you choose to believe it. Responsibility for one’s own success doesn’t mean you have to create it all on your own with no help. Nor does it mean that knowing you are responsible for your life and results causes you to be successful.
Any and all success, no matter who takes responsibility or who takes the credit, begins with this idea. We all have to decide we are responsible for creating our future. We created our present circumstances, either by the choices we made or by allowing life to happen to us.That’s a little unnerving for some of us. Our choices brought us to where we are. Sure, we interact with others and they affect us. However our deliberate active choices or lack of choices brought us to those interactions. We choose to forge a path or we choose to follow a path.
Accepting responsibility though is the first step. After that we MUST act on that responsibility. If we don’t act on it, we are really ceding our will to others and allowing them to choose our path and our destination. Doing that doesn’t relieve us of our greatest responsibility though. We still choose who we are allowing to set our course. Us or others.
Responsibility can be a scary word because it means you not only take the credit, you can take the blame if things fail. That’s a bad way to think of responsibility though. That affirmation or belief at the beginning of this post is all about owing your results. Ownership makes an amazing difference in how we live our lives.
Have you ever noticed the difference in homes that are rented versus homes that are owned? Rented homes tend to be in worse condition than homes that are lived in by the owners. Renters aren’t responsible for most maintenance, nor are they interested in the long-term care of the place they live in. They can move and only worry about the loss of a security deposit. An owner can’t neglect the upkeep and care of their home without losing their entire investment which can be several hundred thousand dollars in many cases.
Taking responsibility for your life, your future and your results is owning them. What kind of results do you think you’ll get if you own your results instead of renting them?
