If you are still young enough to have children in school, listen sometime to the way they tell you what grades they get on tests and other projects.
In all likelihood, if the grade is a B or better, your child will say, “I got a B on my term paper!” or “I got an A on my science test!”
However, if the grade is C or worse, you might hear, “Mrs. Smith gave me a C- on that composition I worked so hard on,” or “Mr. Jones flunked me on my math test.”
Do you see what the difference is? If it is a grade to be proud of, the child is very happy to take credit for it, but if it is a less than satisfactory grade, it is the teacher’s fault. Ask a teacher, and he or she will tell you that this tendency to take responsibility for high grades but pass the responsibility for low grades to someone else is a universal reality among students.
Even when you ask children about their grades and they do not respond in complete sentences, the answers will be the same. Ask, “What did you get on your term paper?” and the child will answer, “An A,” or “She gave me a C.” The A is his; the C was thrust upon him by his teacher.
It’s human nature to take credit for what is good and give someone else the credit for what is less than good.
I have a different philosophy, one that has served me well. I call it an attitude or personal responsibility.
Personal responsibility means accepting the reality that you are the cause of everything that has happened to you in your life.
I can hear what you’re thinking.
“I’m not responsible for my parents’ divorce,” you say, and that is, in all likelihood, true. But, you are responsible for your response to it.
“I’m not responsible for being laid off from the job I had for 20 years when the company went belly up,” you say, and that is probably true. But you are responsible for your reaction to it and your behavior because of it.
“I’m not responsible for the bank’s error that resulted in my mortgage check bouncing,” you say. I know, but you are responsible for the way you handle the outcome.
It is a proven fact that foreclosures happen not just because people miss mortgage payments. More often, the foreclosure is the result of the way people respond when their failure to make payments becomes an issue.
That’s what taking personal responsibility means.
I know some people have tough lives and others have even tougher lives. Bad things really do happen to good people. Life isn’t always fair; it’s just life.
All those clichés became clichés because they are all true. What isn’t true is that people are destined for failure because of the hardships they have had to endure during their lifetime.
Things happen, but we are always the cause for treating those things as catalyzing or victimizing. You determine whether to be a winner or a victim.
Something on television this weekend caught my eye as I was channel surfing. It was a story about a young boy who lives in Lake Placid, New York and has pursued an interest in bobsledding, using the course originally created for the Lake Placid Winter Olympics several years ago. He started bobsledding when he was about six. At age 11, he fairly accomplished and is looking forward to making the Olympic team some day. Why is his story special? Because at age seven, the boy became blind. I don’t know what made him blind. I missed that part of the story. I didn’t miss seeing him make a run down the Lake Placid bobsled course. He’s pretty good.
He could have grown up to be a bitter man because he was blinded by something at a very young age. People would have sympathized with him. He would have had a number of government agencies willing to provide him with money and other tools to help him cope.
Instead, he treated the handicap as a bump in the road, or the bobsled course if you will, and continued to pursue the dreams he had before his blindness.
Will his blindness make life difficult for him in the future? Yes, but he has taken personal responsibility for his life, and I have no doubt that he will be successful in whatever he does.
This boy is free to do whatever he wants to do with his life. That’s what taking personal responsibility for your life gives you—the freedom to do and become whatever you want to do and become.
It also nullifies the cruelty of life, the tough times, the unfairness. When you take personal responsibility for your life, you turn the bad things into bumps in the road. Yes, you have to negotiate them, but you don’t have to come to a screeching halt and spend the rest of your life discussing who put those bumps there, how hard it is for you to continue on, and how unfair things are because they are there.
You are the cause of everything that has happened in your life.
Unsuccessful behavior is finding scapegoats for the results you have produced in your life. Success requires that you take personal responsibility for your life in ways that will not limit your success.
When I don’t like an outcome, I change my behavior, but I have to realize I created the behavior so I can change it.
Personal responsibility and successful living are the same thing.
The only failure you will ever need to worry about is the failure to take personal responsibility for your life.
Think of it this way. If it happened, you did it. It’s not about fault, it’s about getting results.
You may want to suggest that same thing to your kids who are still in school.
Original writing date: April 2003