Your Life. Your Responsibility.

Take responsibility for your life and stop finding excuses, scapegoats and reasons why something wrong isn't your fault. Your life and your decisions are yours- own them.
 ~J.V. Manning

It is Monday morning. You forgot to set your alarm the night before and you wake up late. You rush through a shower, grab some coffee and fly out the door. You cannot be late to work again. Off you go breaking one traffic law after another. Stop signs, red lights and speed limits mean nothing to you as you try and make it to work on time. You hit an open stretch of highway and hit the gas- nothing in your way now. Suddenly out of nowhere, blue lights in the review mirror. Busted. Litanies of plausible excuses immediately run through your mind as the trooper ambles up to your window.  When he asks as they all do- "do you know why I pulled you over?"You decide on coy and plead ignorance. When he tells you that you were 17 miles over the limit, you "breakdown" and blame everyone but the one person who deserves it. Yourself. Hearing it all before the trooper writes you a ticket. In your mind you vow to fight it. You end up late to work and furious at the cop for making you late. 

Personal Responsibility- our own cause and effect.
Our actions determine our life. Our actions determine our happiness, our success and our failures. Yet when we make a mistake we spend more time finding other people to blame and creating excuses as to why something isn't our fault, then we do fixing it and making it better so that we can move on. 

I was having a conversation the other day with a friend. He is always late. His excuse is that tardiness runs in his family, he can't help it. Really? I have another friend who has a daughter in her early twenties who has made some really poor life decisions as of late. What 20 year old doesn't? But to hear her mother talk none of it is her daughter's fault.  "She takes after her father- he is so lazy."Or my personal favorite- "she keeps losing her jobs because she is just like me and can't focus on boring things like answering phones."  I looked at my friend and asked her if she thought making excuses for her daughter was helping her in the long run. What was she teaching her? She made me shake my head when she said, "Moms are supposed to cover for their children.” No, parents are supposed to teach their children to be responsible for their actions. Teach them to make good decisions and how to learn from their mistakes. Teach them cause and effect. Teach them that their decisions directly affect their life. 

We all make mistakes. We get into relationships that are not healthy. We break speed limits. We cheat on diets and we run late. We break our own rules and we sometimes make bad decisions. It is called life. The problem is- most will blame everyone else for what happens to them. How is it that we think we control our lives if we say we have no control over even the simplest actions like being on time. If you are constantly cheating on your diet because a coworker brings in treats- it is not the coworkers fault. It is yours. If you are constantly late- it is not the traffic or your alarm clock- it is you. If you are constantly dating men or women that break your heart, cheat on you or worse- that is on you too. 

You have 100% control of only one thing in this life. Yourself.

Your health, your time management, your happiness and your life is no one's responsibility but your own. Own your mistakes. Stop blaming bad habits on family traits. Break the cycle. If everyone in your family has the same problem- be the one that owns it and DOES something about it. Stop letting it go just because everyone else has.

Take responsibility for your life and stop finding excuses, scapegoats and reasons why something wrong isn't your fault.  If you need help- ask for it. If you need to learn how- research it. If you need to stop making the same mistakes over and over again- look for the reasons behind why you do what you do. If you stop blaming outside forces for your own mistakes- you will find solutions so much faster.

Stop the: “It is not my fault because…” and instead try the: “Yes I screwed up, now what am I going to do about it…”

Take Responsibility for the only thing in this life you can control- YOU!