Just about everyone agrees that it’s a good thing to be responsible, but not everyone agrees about what “responsibility” means. Are you a responsible person? What does it mean to you to be responsible? Does it mean doing what is expected of you? Keeping your promises? Being a good provider?
All of these things are important, but being responsible means more than that. In fact, when it comes right down to it, we are responsible for absolutely everything in our lives – all of the successes, and all of the failures, too.
If you don’t accept responsibility for your life, you are likely to just shrug off your failures thinking you have nothing to learn from them. If you don’t take full responsibility for your life, you will never be happy, because no one can make you happy but you.
You might wonder, then, if you’re responsible for illness and adversity, too. Well, you are certainly not responsible for earthquakes or the drunk driver who sideswipes your car. But you are, without a doubt, responsible for how you respond to these things – and whether or not you choose to use them to learn from and to grow.
Taking responsibility for your life gives you the freedom to take risks and make mistakes, and that’s a great feeling. Of course, it also means you need to be prepared to take the consequences of your risks and mistakes. There are two sides to the responsibility coin, and the other side is accountability.
It is difficult to grow very much at all if you are not willing to do these things. But if you are willing, there really is no limit to how far you can go.