An old friend of mine reached out seeking advice. He started by complaining about some of his unpleasant experiences at work and in life. I could not help but notice that he was blaming his boss, the company, his previous job, and almost everyone in his life but himself. The victim mentality was all over his narrative, and while some of what he was saying did show a bad doing from his manager, the blame game kept on rolling.
Even if the stories were true, as a person, you either believe in the Internal Locus of Control, where you are the leading character in your story, or the External locus of control, giving up the power over your destiny, blaming the surrounding and everything in it, in order to victimize yourself.
Having the maturity to accept the responsibility for your own life will not make the problems go away, at least not right away, but it will undoubtedly create a paradigm shift in your mind. When you see yourself in charge of your life and everything that happens in it, then by default, you are in control, and you can affect it. On the other hand, if you blame external factors, you subconsciously give up your power, saying that it is out of your control and, thus, you can’t do anything about it.
Accepting responsibility for everything in your life is a brain hack. You see, it all goes back to emotional regulation. We lose our cool when we lose our emotional regulation, and vice versa; we keep our cool and stay in control when we apply emotional regulation.
This discussion reminded me of “The Art of Exceptional Living,” an audiobook by Jim Rohn, which is one of the best resources to live a better and happier life, so I shared the audiobook link with my friend and asked him to go through it, before resuming our conversation.
In the book, Jim talks about the five essential abilities one must have in life.
- The Ability to Absorb. Capture and learn from everything around you, and never be too proud to discover something new or unlearn something that no longer serves you. You must be humble enough to admit that you don’t know everything and can find wisdom from the most unimaginable sources. Jim Rohn always says, “Wherever you are, be there.” This advice is so important, as it means you should always be fully present wherever you are so you can live that moment and absorb it.
- The Ability to Respond. Let the emotions touch you, and live any emotion you go through, happy or sad; you must feel and live it fully. Let the feelings move you; only then will you be able to open your heart to life’s learnings and wisdom.
- The Ability to Reflect. Talking to yourself and reflecting on your day or week, or even the past year, is crucial. As employees, we all go through our periodic performance reviews with our management and see whether or not we are delivering on our KPIs. Self-reflection and evaluation are the same, except you do it with yourself and evaluate yourself. This means you always strive to grow and learn; you prioritize your solitude, meditate and reflect, and be mature enough to take charge of your life and never play the victim card. Remember that self-investment is noble and earns you respect; self-sacrifice is not, as it only earns contempt.
- The Ability to Act. In short, put all your learnings into actionable and measurable next steps. If you can learn and reflect, you will know what you want to achieve. The next phase is to break goals down into clear steps to work on within a set timeframe until you accomplish them. Use the SMART methodology (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, Timely), but don’t wait too long. Work on translating those learnings into actions when the ideas are still hot and your emotions intense. Otherwise, the law of diminishing intent kicks in.
- The Ability to Share. Learn to share wisdom with others and pass on the knowledge. They say the best way to learn something is to teach it; hence, sharing is a win-win deal where you get to know something and help others learn it too. Nothing beats the look of gratitude in the eyes of others when you help them. It gives you purpose and meaning.
In Julia Roberts’s “Eat Pray Love,” there is a scene called the “bumper sticker” scene where she is arguing with her friend, Richard. She was stressed about some matters in her life, somehow to stay busy and not really face life’s serious issues to avoid facing herself. In the middle of the heated argument, Richard was teaching her to let go of trying to control everything and just surrender and let it be to see what happens. “You have to learn to select your thoughts the same way you would select your clothes every day. Now, that’s a power that you can cultivate. If you want to come and you want to control your life so bad, work on the mind, and that is the only thing you should be trying to control. Because if you can’t master your thoughts, you are in trouble forever.”
To conclude, I will leave you with a final quote by Jim Rohn, “The objective of life is not rest; the objective of life is to act.”
Source:-
- “The Art of Exceptional Living” by Jim Rohn
- “Eat Pray Love,” the movie
- The Locus of Control is the extent to which you feel you have control over events that impact your life. In other words, it is “a belief about whether the outcomes of our actions are contingent on what we do (internal control orientation) or on events outside our personal control (external control orientation),” explains psychologist Philip Zimbardo.
