You Will Never Grow If You Don’t Take Responsibility For Your Actions
The secret to learning from your mistakes
People who don’t take responsibility for their actions slow down human progress.
And on a micro scale, they’re preventing themselves from growing as individuals.
From the time we were born, we’ve been learning from our mistakes. We tried to walk, fell, got back up, adjusted, repeated and eventually figured it out.
The fall is what taught us better.
At some point along life’s journey, it seems that some of us have forgotten that to make sure you don’t fall again, you need to first take responsibility for the reasons behind your fall.
That is how you grow.
The basics of failing
Failing sucks. It’s true, despite what some people may say nowadays.
Failing can result in failed businesses, broken bones, people going hungry, or on the extreme scale, death.
It’s these failures that teach us life’s important lessons though.
Just imagine someone’s company went under, and instead of taking responsibility for their poor leadership, they blame the employees.
Little do they realize they had poor hiring practices and the reason these employees got hired (and never got fired) was because of them in the first place.
Now, this person will likely go on to repeat the same mistakes because they did not take responsibility for their failures.
As a result, they will not learn from the failure and be doomed to repeat it again.
Shielding yourself from the blame or failure does not mean it didn’t happen, and it doesn’t mean it won’t happen again.
It means the exact opposite.
When you screw up, it is up to you to take responsibility and learn from it.
Practice taking responsibility
Congrats. You’ve realized that you have not been taking responsibility for where your life is.
Now what?
You need to start practicing to take responsibility regularly. You can do this by first acknowledging how much in your life comes down to how you behave and act.
You are to blame for 99% of the negative things that happen to you (sorry, but it’s true).
If someone hurts your feelings, it is because you let their opinion matter to you.
If you are late for work, it’s not because of traffic. It is because you didn’t plan for the traffic.
If you are tired, it is not because you had a bad sleep. It’s because you didn’t go to bed early enough – you were watching TikTok in bed full-on knowing it would prevent you from sleeping.
If you are gaining weight, it’s not because you have been too busy to workout. It’s because you’ve been eating poorly and prioritizing cookies over workouts.
If your girlfriend broke up with you for cheating, it’s not because you got drunk. It is because you are a piece of shit who made a mistake and cheated.
These are little things that happen daily. Little things that you have not been taking responsibility for.
This is the perfect place to start.
Once you get used to taking responsibility for the little things, it will be easier to do the same when something bigger happens like your company failing, failing a class or when you cause a car accident.
That’s when you will start to grow.
We all screw up
So, why have you been avoiding taking responsibility for yourself in the first place?
For most of you, it is likely because you have been taught that failing is the end of the world.
You got punished for getting an F on an exam
Your angry hockey dad yelled at you for not scoring
Your ballet teacher didn’t let you perform because you didn’t learn the dance
These failures have been engraved in your head and have slowly trained you not to take responsibility for your actions in fear of the consequences.
Now, you are no longer learning from your failures.
The truth is, we all screw up. Failure is part of daily life and it is how we learn.
Yes, it is awful and yes, you should prevent it at all costs.
But, it does happen and when it does, you need to take responsibility so that you can prevent it from happening again.
At the end of the day, you should ask yourself how bad taking responsibility will be. I’m willing to bet the consequences are blown up in your head 9 times out of 10.
Your fear of failure is making the healthy choice scarier than reality.
Conclusion
Taking responsibility is the necessary first step for you to learn from your failures.
While blaming others, or pretending mistakes never happened in the first place may seem like an easier solution, it hurts your growth and human progress as a whole.
You have been taught to fear failure, losing and taking blame for so many years that it has made you weaker.
It’s time to flip the script and start taking responsibility for our actions again.
Thanks for reading