10 Ways to Take Responsibility for Your Life

Many people say they would like to change their lives or make positive changes but seem to encounter obstacles, complain, feel restless or postpone taking decisive action.  Now is the moment to be more pro-active.  Consider 10 ways to take greater responsibility for your life:

1. Prioritize Yourself

To take more control of life, deep down, we must feel worthy, deserving of good things, better decisions. Holding self-limiting beliefs, perpetuating negative self-talk ("I can't or won't...")  causes us to avoid responsibility.  Thus, we may feel undeserving of better. Thing is, we can only love and support others if we love and support self first, practice self-love and self-care.

2. Stop Blaming the External

Although common practice, blaming others for our conditions is a form of self-sabotage, an unconscious attempt to escape from growing up (maturing as a soul). Society teaches us to and judge others rather than address our own actions. When we are hyper-focused on other people’s behaviours, we often overlook signs and signals we give ourselves and available big life lessons.

3. Develop Self-Awareness

To take responsibility for our thoughts and actions, we must grow self-aware. Self-reflection allows us to deepen awareness.  To grow mindful of feelings, thoughts as they arise, helps us understand our actions,  patterns and reasons behind the things we do.

4. Be Accountable

Being responsible entails being accountable to yourself.  Some people love external praise and their own positive feelings and yet find it hard to realize they are the source of all their behaviour, perception, feelings, or results. Pride blocks growth.  To be accountable is to accept and understand our role in each situation.  How we are treated depends on how we treat ourselves. The key is self-honesty, not avoiding transparency. Of course, self-pity and guilt are not helpful.

5. Get to Know Yourself

Turns out, we are conditioned to adopt other people’s beliefs about us.  Beyond external conditioning, we all have our own sense of success and happiness.  Though family and peers may have good intentions, we cannot act to appease others and live in integrity.  If parents may want their child to look a certain way, choose a specific training, career, or partner. We would not blindly listen if we took steps to get to know self, our version of happiness and success. This requires self-honesty.  We may even need to separate from people who constantly impose their views.  This can create internal conflict, complicating our decision-making.

6. Love Yourself

Taking responsibility can be difficult until we love ourselves enough to get that every moment, we control our thoughts, feelings and life direction. Realizing this changes things.  When we judge ourselves harshly, we throw off our inner balance. We feel ungrounded, unsupported, unsustainable, and very discouraged. Self-love guides us to the wisdom within the self. A mere shift in perspective is a potent action in the name of love.

7. Eliminate Excuses

To make excuses is not responsible, like denying you are the captain of your ship. An irresponsible person may say they want to eat healthier but say they don’t have time. However, to be responsible, accountable, and honest, is to prioritize creating time. We can find many reasons not to make life changes.  Yet, this is giving our power away. We all have the same 24 hours per day. We are all responsible for how we choose to use it.

8. Remove Toxic People

Toxic people enable us to continue unhealthy habits and toxic behaviour. People who genuinely care for us and love us will hold you accountable.  They want to see us achieve our dreams. Other individuals want to keep us  co-dependent.  To take responsibility for life means taking responsibility for our entourage, and relationships. People who frequently complain, self-loathe, self-deprecate, and speak down on your progress do not benefit our growth.  Creating distance brings us inner strength. Nourish healthy and supportive interaction. Also, seek to establish emotional independence to make better decisions from an objective stance and attract authentic people into our life experience.

9. Eradicate Negative Self-Talk

Negative self-talk can arise from childhood trauma inflicted by abuse or bullying. These negative, self-limiting beliefs we have of ourselves usually originate from the projections and judgments other people throw at us. When we are younger, we tend to internalize these words, and they become ingrained. It takes time to un-condition such negative ideas about Self. However, it’s possible by doing activities aimed at self-love and self-care. We come into this world with a very clean slate.  As we grow, we begin to take on our personality. Much of this has to do with the environments. However, we can take responsibility for our lives and reclaim our full potential.

10.  Take Quantum Leaps outside Comfort Zones

The only way to truly take full and complete responsibility for our lives is to rediscover what it is to experience examples of fearlessness. This may begin in a playground swing,  allowing ourselves to fear the wind in our hair as we pump the swing higher.  As we gain courage and confidence, we increasingly make choices to do what we have not done before, confront our fears and see where assertiveness and adventurousness take us.  This may guide us to new job, new relationships, new entourage, new pastimes and ways to spend out time.  Remind yourself the five people you spend the most time with are the five people you are becoming.

Listen to the breath speak

How often do we hear breath speak and truly listen? Here is an insight shared by a Rabbi: 

The name of God back in the day was Yahweh because breath was life. Give it a go.  As we breathe in, we make a sound similar to 'Yah' and out sounds like 'weh.' That's how God got that name. Originally, it was believed that every time a human being took a breath, we are praising the name of the Creator.

Imagine that every creature on this planet, whether they know it or not, says the name of the creator in the language of every breath. Imagine the impact of consciously reminding ourselves this is also the first thing we say when we are born in abody and the last thing said when the physical body dies and soul moves on. Every moment of every day, we are voicing who we are under and through our own breath.

Shrink the monster

As you focus on the experience of feeling healthy, joyful and sharing that, you extend this state of being.  When you focus on difficulties, you feed them, enabling them to grow.  Every unkind thought, word or self-criticism gives the inner monster energy and power over you. Buddha calls them 'anger-eating demons.'

How would your life experience change if you treated situations or people that evoke discomfort with love and kindness?  Imagine all the difficult people you encounter, those who mistreat you or trigger negative feelings.  What do they teach? People are often unaware of what they do.  Rather than get angry, why not view everything as a wonderful opportunity to laugh and grow? Then the world laughs with, not at you. 

What if the most difficult person in life is actually you? In order to learn to live with people who push your buttons, it is first necessary to gain insight into and grow more accepting of your true essence.  Then you realize how people relate to you does not always reflect how they truly feel.  Notice what happens as you show compassion, appreciate everyone as they are.  How you see shifts with your patience and kindness. 

Remember how to stop being your own enemy. Relax. Accept who you are. Knowing the causes of being difficult enables you to recognize how to shrink the monster within. You come to reailze difficult people are projections of your own rejection. Suddenly, difficulty is a figment of your imagination. As you come to understand true self, then nothing and nobody are difficult.  Be still and the source of irritation disappears.