Accept Responsibility

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When people spend time with you, do they come away feeling better or worse? Would you want to spend time with you?

One way to guarantee that people come away feeling worse is to complain. Nobody wants to be around a complainer. Each time you complain, you are simply reliving a bad experience. The solution: stop complaining and start reframing. Find something positive about your situation and focus your energy there.

Assume you are assigned a task at work that you either don’t want or don’t agree with. You can choose to have a bad attitude and complain about it, or you can accept that you have two viable options: Find a way out by convincing someone else to do it, or figure out how to get it done yourself. As my former boss and mentor would say, “if you can’t get out of it, get into it.”

You have the power to decide how you will be in each moment of your life. This decision ultimately determines your attitude.

Once you realize that your attitude is your decision, you understand that you can accept responsibility for how you react to things that happen in life. Taken one step farther, you can accept responsibility for your life situation. If you choose not to accept responsibility, you become a victim. Victims blame others for their challenges. If responsibility lies outside of you, you have no power to fix it. Taking responsibility puts you in a position of power. If you own the challenge, you can do something about it. This mindset allows you to control your own destiny. The solution: accept responsibility for everything that happens in your life.