How often do you feel aggravated, impatient, or exasperated Marco?
Your answer reveals the extent to which you believe yourself responsible for your own happiness or lack thereof. Brains have a sneaky way of turning us into victims of our own self-crafted lives and if we’re not careful, this hidden thought pattern can leave us feeling exhausted, resentful, and demoralized.
Understanding where our feelings come from lays the groundwork for responsibility. In brief, feelings are the result of interpretations of experiences and people in our lives, not experiences and people directly. This can be a mind-bendy concept but a real game-changer when it comes to taking charge of our emotional health. If you want to take a deep dive into this concept definitely check out the module on Emotions 101 in my online program.
When you believe other people or things that happen to you are the cause of how you feel, you give away the power to change how your feel. This simple thought error thwarts your ability to respond, which is the very definition of response-ability. In other words, externalizing credit for our emotional life delegates responsibility to the very things we can’t control, which robs us of agency.
Sometimes we confuse blame with responsibility, especially when it comes to ourselves. A simple way to tell the difference is that self-blame does not lead to action; it shuts us down and layers on negative emotions while responsibility drives action fueled by empowering emotions like determination, decisiveness, and self-discipline. Blaming others unwittingly puts them in the driver’s seat of our emotional lives and deceives us into believing our feelings are reliant on someone else’s actions.
How and where we perceive responsibility has a direct impact on our level of happiness and satisfaction so it’s worth taking a closer look into where you assign responsibility. Here’s a worksheet to help you do just that.
