Connect with Responsibility

You can make mistakes , but you are not a failure until you start blaming others for those mistakes. It’s true. Why do we do this?

We all do this a lot. Tune into social media and see the finger-pointing going on. Such division occurs when we blame others and live in the self imposed facade that we are not to blame. We are all to blame. We can all do better. Imagine the difference if we all just did a little better.

I had a guest recently in one of my properties who left it in a much different state than when she arrived. It was not pretty. My housekeeper had to wait in the driveway in sweltering heat for 2 hours because she was late checking out. It took 2 days to clean up after her, what should normally take 4 hours. There was a sticky substance on every surface. It ate right through the finish on two tables. There were items broken. Carpets stained. You get the picture. Not at all the way she found it. When confronted, she said it wasn’t her fault and she was being profiled because of her ethnicity. This was a great excuse except we don’t meet our renters and have no idea what their ethnicity is. So then there is that.

And so on the story goes. We have to be able to own our mistakes folks. We can’t blame our parents, a teacher that didn’t do their job or a system that failed us. We can only move forward when we take responsibility for us and we start walking forward. Yes, it is hard and we have to overcome some difficult stuff. Yes, unfair stuff happens. We can grieve that and shake it off and move forward or we can sit in it and drown. The final forming of our lives lies in our own hands. No one is coming to rescue us , we must rescue ourselves. We are our own saviors.

JK Rowling said, there is an expiration date for blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction, the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, the responsibility lies within you. Parents do lots of damage sometimes, we have to find a good therapist and process that, but if we don’t let it go and move forward, we are not taking responsibility for our own lives and we will be in misery, it will be a life sentence. We all have to forgive our parents for things, some bigger things than others, because our parents are human. If we don’t work through that forgiveness, we will one day repeat those same mistakes.

Let your kids see you take responsibility for your mistakes. Don’t teach them the self-destructive trait of blame. Blame is lame. Don’t wound your kids this way and expect them not to limp through life. Teaching kids to be responsible for their behavior is a wonderful opportunity for growth. For parent and child.

Being responsible is equal to living with integrity. You can dress your blame up and make it sound really good but at the end of the day, it is still lame blame. In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility (Roosevelt, Eleanor) And then Theodore Roosevelt said, if you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.

It’s true, so when you get ready to point the finger, go look in the mirror first. Attack the evil that is within yourself, rather than attacking the evil that is in others-Confucius.