There’s a lot of talk on the news these days about accountability. Are we holding government employees accountable when they don’t serve the public perfectly? Are we holding society accountable for systemic sexism and racism? We even worry if our family and friends are living their lives as we would like. We are obsessed with looking at everyone else to see if they are doing everything correctly. And in the meantime, personal accountability has gone by the wayside.
I’ll admit that it’s easier to point fingers at others rather than focus on your own mistakes. After all, it’s much easier to point out the speck in someone else’s eye rather than focus on the log in your own. But if you want to succeed in life, the key is to stop looking at everyone else and to take a good, hard look at yourself.
Realize that you only have control over one thing in life – your own behavior. Sure, you can try to influence social and political issues, and you may even have some impact. But frankly, if you really want to make the world a better place, you are better off monitoring your own behavior.
Below are ways to practice personal accountability in your life. Apply these approaches, and see your life change for the better.
Take Personal Responsibility for Your Past Bad Choices and Decide to Make Better Ones
I will admit that on occasion, other people cause our problems. If you grew up in a dysfunctional home or had a bad marriage, other people have created problems in your life. And sadly, you have borne the brunt of their bad behavior.
But most of the time, our problems are of our own making. Take a hard look at any area in your life which isn’t going well and ask yourself, “Why is this happening?” Now, your gut instinct will be to blame someone else for your situation. But drill down further. If you do, you’ll likely find that at some point, you made a bad choice which then snowballed into a bad situation.
For example, I used to be frustrated that I wasn’t further along in my career. I looked at the careers of my peers and saw that they’d achieved things that I never would. And my initial instinct was to blame others for my lack of professional achievement.
But when I drilled down further, I realized that the fault was mine. In order to have a successful career, you need to do two things. You need to develop an expertise in one specific area. And you need to live in the same place, so that you can develop a good reputation within your community and have long-term relationships with colleagues in your field.
Unfortunately, I did neither. During my life, I failed to stick with one area of professional expertise. Instead, I took jobs as they came my way, even if they weren’t in the same field. And instead of living in the same place, I moved around – a lot.
In hindsight, I can see that those both were massive mistakes. And if I could go back in time, I would have done things very differently. Unfortunately, there are no do-overs in life. But now I have come to recognize that those mistakes were mine.
It is easy to engage in the blame game rather than take responsibility for our own bad choices. But that’s what personal accountability is all about.
The good news is that once you take personal responsibility for your choices, you can start making better ones in the future. For example, once I accepted that my lack of career advancement was my own doing, I started making better career choices. I began making both career and personal choices that supported my career advancement. And when I did that, my career fell into place!
So, don’t engage in the blame game. Be willing to be personally accountable for your past bad choices. Learn from your mistakes so that you can make better choices and have a better future.
Have an Easier Life by Being Personally Accountable
When we take personal responsibility for our actions, we take control of our lives. For instance, many people live in fear of contracting the coronavirus. They think that think that they have no control over whether or not they get infected. But when you take personal responsibility for your actions by wearing a mask, social distancing and getting vaccinated, you don’t have to live in fear because your likelihood of contracting COVID is small.
The same holds true for all kinds of fears. If you fear getting arrested, walk the straight and narrow, and don’t break the law. By being responsible for your actions, the likelihood of your getting arrested goes down exponentially.
Similarly, if you fear losing your job, try to maintain perfect attendance, work hard, and follow your supervisor’s directions. If you take ownership of how you act at work and try to do a good job, it’s highly unlikely that your employer will fire you. In short, if you are personally accountable for your actions, you don’t have to live in fear of bad things happening to you.
When we start being personally accountable for our actions, we want to do the right thing. That is because we know that our good actions will will bear good fruit. Yes, once in a while, bad things happen to good people. People with good exercise and dietary habits sometimes get terrible illnesses. Folks who have done nothing wrong can be at the wrong place at the wrong time and get arrested. Hard workers can lose their jobs.
But for the most part, if you hold yourself to a high standard of behavior, your life will go along smoothly. That is because there is a direct correlation between your quality of life and your behavior.
Now that may sound harsh, but it’s actually liberating. As soon as we recognize the relationship between our actions and our life experience, our perspective changes. We realize that we aren’t powerless. Instead, we have the power to act in ways that make our lives better. And we have the power to make choices that are for our benefit.
The key to creating a successful life is personal accountability. As soon as we understand that our actions and choices have brought us to where we are today, we can start making better choices in the future to create a great life! (To read about taking responsibility for your happiness, click here.) (To read about the power of taking responsibility, click here.)
No one goes through life unscathed. We all have experienced things that we wish we hadn’t. And we’ve all seen Read more
Many people in our society lack of confidence. And that is understandable. We live in a world in which folks Read more
I used to think that the Buddhist theory of acceptance was a defeatist approach to life. The idea behind acceptance Read more
“The root of suffering is attachment.” – The Buddha The older I get, the more I understand the Buddha’s statement Read more
Dealing with change is hard. No one enjoys it. We are all creatures of habit, and we all would prefer Read more
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle We are our Read more
Our words matter. We think that they don’t. In fact, many of us believe in the old adage, “Sticks and Read more
There are a lot of articles and books about how to make good choices. Advice on that topic abounds. But Read more
