5 Simple Ways to Take More Responsibility for Your Life
What You Can Expect to Happen When You Make This a Personal Standard
To create what you want and live the way you’d like to, you need to learn to take more responsibility for your life.
Throughout our lives, we’ve been conditioned to let external circumstances or other people determine what we can or cannot achieve.
This implies we don’t believe we have the power to create the results we want unless other factors meet our expectations of how things should be.
1-Minute Summary Video
What Does It Mean to Take More Responsibility for Your Life
To take more responsibility for your life means to:
- Give up blaming and complaining when you don’t get an outcome you want.
- Own up to your mistakes and learn from them.
- Change how you behave to improve yourself and your results.
- Review what you’re doing regularly.
- Ask for feedback so you can progress faster or improve.
- Let go of things you cannot control or change.
- Avoid changing other people’s behaviour, but focus on changing yours.
- Not let others dictate what you can or cannot do.
Why Take More Responsibility for Your Life?
When you take more responsibility for your life, you will:
- Accept reality instead of resisting it.
- Feel more empowered to change what you do and how you do things.
- Not allow resentment or anger to derail what you’re working towards.
- Feel more inner peace.
- Have a better outlook on life.
- Develop positive relationships.
- Feel a greater sense of ownership for your actions.
- Stop blaming others, situations, or life for why you don’t have what you want.
To live how you want and achieve the success you want, taking full responsibility for everything in your life plays an important role.
What Prevents People from Taking More Responsibility for Their Lives?
People rarely take more responsibility for their lives because:
- Ignorance — they’re not aware they’re in charge of everything in their lives.
- Cultural and environmental conditioning — they did not have suitable role models growing up, which means they do what everyone else does.
- Pride — they do not want to reveal their weaknesses.
- Guilt — they blame themselves for things they’ve done.
- Low self-esteem — they do not have a healthy opinion of themselves.
- Lack of motivation — they’re unwilling to challenge themselves to take more risks in their lives.
- Fear of failure — they’d rather play it safe and blame others for their lack of results instead of risking failure or criticism.
- Unproductive habits — they do not have practices that generate optimism or positivity.
Signs You’re Not Taking Responsibility for Your Life
The signs you aren’t taking responsibility for your life include:
- You don’t have a goal that stretches you out of your comfort zone.
- You look for why something will not work rather than how it could.
- You’re unwilling to ask for help or admit you’re struggling.
- You look for any excuse to justify your lack of results.
- You allow one disappointment or failure to influence your decisions.
- You focus on what others will think of you or say to you if you take a risk.
- You have an entitlement mindset, where you expect things to be handed to you.
- You’re living in the past rather than being future-focused.
What You Can Expect to Happen When You Take More Responsibility for Your Life
When you take more responsibility for your life, things you can expect to happen include:
- You will become a better person and feel good about yourself.
- You will increase your self-confidence and self-esteem.
- You will make decisions faster.
- You will not have mental clutter, which means greater clarity.
- You will easily let go of what you cannot change.
- You will attract opportunities.
- You will decrease stress in your life.
- You will not let others treat you the way you don’t want.
- You will have better mental, emotional, and physical health.
5 Ways You Can Take More Responsibility for Your Life
Here are five ways you can take more responsibility for your life and make it a personal standard.
- Be honest about where you are in life and what you want. This means assessing the different areas of your life to better understand what you need to do to improve them. If you don’t know how you’re doing, you won’t know what to change.
- Give up making excuses, complaining, or blaming others. After you’ve assessed how you’re doing, chances are certain areas of your life won’t be where you’d like them to be. To have a higher sense of ownership of your life, you need to look within rather than on things outside of you. Your personal agency or locus of control begins with letting go of excuses, blaming, and complaining.
- Choose who you spend time with carefully. If you’re around people who’d rather make excuses or complain instead of taking ownership of where they are in life, it will affect you negatively. Find people who are goal-oriented and have a high achievement motivation.
- Ask for help and feedback often. This is one way to make lifelong learning an integral part of your life. Others can see things you can’t, or do things better than you. Use their feedback to improve your personal and professional life.
- Focus more on what you can do rather than on what you can’t do or have. You can focus on why you can’t do something or how you will. When you set goals, ensure they’re something you really want because that will determine how you deal with challenges.
Final Thoughts
When you take more responsibility for your life, things will change around you. Opportunities will come your way unexpectedly simply because you do not let things outside of you influence what you want.
Accepting full responsibility for everything in your life is a great standard to have if you want to live how you want to.
Action Step: A good starting point to accept full responsibility for your life is to assess the different areas of your life. Take the free Life Progress Assessment to get a better idea of what’s working or not in your life. Click here to take the free assessment.
Question: What are other ways to take more responsibility for your life?
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