“The price of greatness is responsibility.” ― Winston Churchill
Taking responsibility for your life, your actions, your mistakes, and your lack of growth puts you in a place where you are always able to learn and often able to win in the end. In sports, that’s called being in the right position. When players put themselves in the right position, they are able to successfully play. It’s not a guarantee that they will make a play or that they will win. However, if a player is out of position, it is almost impossible for them to make a play. And where does that go? You miss enough plays, and you lose the game.
Every time we make a mistake, we can choose to put ourselves in the painful but profitable place of taking responsibility so that we can take right actions for our success, or we can avoid the temporary pain of responsibility and make excuses as if what we did wasn’t our fault. If we respond right by taking responsibility, we can look at our choice and learn from it. As a result, we won’t be as likely to make the same mistake again. However, if we bail out on our responsibility, we don’t look at our decisions the right way, and we don’t learn from them. As a result, we often experience the same exact failures repeatedly over time.
Learning to accept responsibility starts at an early age. This past week, me and my family were out of town for our daughter’s birthday celebration. It has become tradition that each year, we gather with a few close family friends of ours for a camping trip to celebrate her day. The campground we were at has a fun arcade that the kids love. One night while getting ready to have dinner, our nine year old son wasn’t eating. We could tell he was anxious and that something was wrong. Turns out that while at the arcade, he had found a stack of tickets that could be redeemed for prizes. He went and cashed them in as if they were his winnings, and just after, the young girl that they belonged to came back looking for them. He found a group of kids at the arcade and gave them the prizes he had cashed in on because he was so embarrassed at what he had done, and didn’t want to have the prizes in his possession. As he is telling us what happened, tears ran down his face. And he said he wanted to find the girl and give her his play card that had at least $20.00 on it. We were able to find her and her family, and she was the sweetest, and thanked him for finding her, and she wouldn’t accept his card. Her dad commended him for taking responsibility and also wouldn’t accept his play card as a token of his apology. It was a teachable moment for sure, and our son definitely learned a valuable lesson on how accepting responsibility always feels better than trying to sweep your actions under a rug! I also see that as a life lesson learned early about the choices we make!
There is actually a creative process used for finding a scapegoat. Any form of passing blame, or not owning your actions may be handy in the moment, but it’s not helpful in the long run. You’ll never forget it. You can’t grow and learn if your focus is on finding someone else to blame instead of looking at your own shortcomings. In the moment, our son thought that giving away the prizes he didn’t earn would make him feel better for his actions. Only a few minutes later realizing that it didn’t. He was a wreck! And it wasn’t until he owned up to it was he truly able to move on and learn from the mistake.
Ask yourself this… Who is responsible for what happens in your life? Do you believe you should take personal responsibility – Or do you feel as if circumstances outside of your control are responsible and there’s little or nothing you can do about it? Taking responsibility for your life is a choice. That doesn’t mean you believe you are in control of everything in your life. That’s just not humanly possible. But you can take responsibility for yourself and every choice you make. That often makes the difference between someone who learns from things, and someone who just loses! And if you make a mistake (we all will and do), own it!
One of the most crucial decisions we can make after is the act of taking responsibility for our part in the doing. After years of leading, and seeing results from many many bad choices made, I have come to the conclusion that accepting blame is the most important ability that a person can possess. Nothing happens to advance our potential until we step up and say, “I am responsible, I did it. What did I learn and how can we grow from this?” If you don’t take responsibility, you are giving up control of your life! There is something freeing about admitting our screw-ups, even when it hurts, learning from them, and moving on!