“I don’t have enough time and there are more important things I have to take care of right now.”
I haven’t written an article for Next Level Rebel in months and this was the excuse I told myself to keep ignoring it.
I was busy working long hours on my businesses and online projects, yet I still was the only one to blame for my failure.
Although everybody would understand me neglecting this blog because I was working like mad on my businesses, I still wasn’t 100 percent honest with myself.
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Most people are unhappy with their current life situation. They are unsatisfied with their financial situation, the look of their bodies or their success with women.
Yet they blame their current situation on others or circumstances instead of taking a good hard look at themselves.
“My parents/boss/genetics/god/(insert random excuse) are to blame.”
It’s easy to blame others or circumstances for your failures, but what you don’t realize is that you are giving away your power to change something once you give away your responsibility.
In this article, you will learn why it is absolutely crucial for your success and happiness to take full responsibility for your life, how you actually follow through with it and why taking responsibility doesn’t mean blaming yourself.
Why You Were Born To Blame Others
Before we talk about why it is so important to take radical responsibility for your life, I want you to understand why it’s actually so difficult to do it.
The answer lies in your programming. Ever since you were a child you were not only conditioned to blame others, but it’s also deeply rooted in your psychology.
As a child, you are totally dependent on your parents, both emotionally and physically. They give you love and affection and take care of your physical needs.
You see, a very long time ago, blaming others could have saved your life.
If you did “something wrong” you were afraid your parents could take away their love from you and stopped providing for you. This could have meant death.
As a result, you are designed to blame others to protect yourself.
Luckily, we don’t live in these times anymore and once you are at a certain age, that’s no excuse anyway. You got to break out of this conditioning and recognize it for what it is worth.
Once you go to school and later in your work life, the cycle continues. You blame others for your mistakes to save your ass, avoid pain, punishment or in case of a job, to keep being able to put food on the table.
So you are programmed and conditioned to avoid taking responsibility and blame others when possible. And on top of that, it’s part of your design, your psyche.
You have to break through that conditioning. You alone are responsible for not taking responsibility and giving into your lower nature. You are stronger than that. You have the power to change it and start taking control of your life.
How You Throw Away Your Power
It’s easy to blame others instead of taking responsibility. No one wants to admit to themselves that they are actually the cause of their failures and misfortunes.
That would mean that you have fucked up greatly in a lot of ways – and that would suck.
It’s a tough pill to swallow. You have to be brutally honest with yourself and that is really difficult.
Yo have the power. You can choose to keep playing the victim of bad circumstances and stay unhappy in your current situation – or you take radical responsibility for your life and start changing what needs to be changed.
It’s all on you. You can’t influence other people, how they respond to you, or what kind of upbringing you had.
So when you blame these things, you are giving away all your power to actually change something.
Start taking full responsibility now, even if it’s completely absurd.
Even if it’s only the way you respond to the situation and how you think.
People can torture you, hit you in the face and take everything from you but they don’t have the power over your thoughts if you don’t let them.
It all starts with your mindset. If you take on the mindset of being able to change something, even if it’s super small, you’ll find a way to do it and you will regain your power.
Otherwise, you will keep staying in that derp-state and nothing will change – ever.
The Critical Difference Between Blame And Responsibility
There are always a lot of people that cry out when speaking about this concept of radical responsibility:
“How am I supposed to take full responsibility if there are things that happen totally out of my control?”
This is a really good point. Nobody wants to take responsibility for things they aren’t really responsible for.
Take your genetics for example. Or the way your parents raised you. Or an alcoholic father who beat you when you were growing up.
Are you responsible for these things? No of course not. Everything else would be just madness.
But what you are responsible for is what you make out of these things.
See, what a lot of people get wrong is mixing up blame and responsibility.
Just because you take responsibility for things that happen out of your control, doesn’t automatically make you the one to blame.
Taking responsibility doesn’t mean taking the blame.
Taking responsibility in these situations means taking back your power to change them. Taking responsibility means still finding a way to live life to the fullest and succeed in your biggest dreams in spite of your shortcomings.
Taking responsibility means letting go of these traumas and emotional wounds you have and going back into happiness.
Taking responsibility means taking back control of your life instead of playing the victim and blaming this or that.
Forget the concept of blame completely. Get it out of your head. It doesn’t serve you. And it doesn’t matter who is to blame.
Stop blaming others, and stop beating yourself up over shit. It’s got no purpose. Just accept the responsibility and start actually doing something about it. Leave the rest behind you and take back your power.
How To Always Take Full Responsibility For Your Life
So how do you do it? How do you actually take radical responsibility for your life?
It seems impossible. You can’t possibly do that, or can you?
The first step is realizing that you actually can. You have the choice and power to take responsibility every single moment of your life.
In certain moments you might think you had no other choice, but the truth is that you are often not brutally honest with yourself.
How You Can Change Every Part Of Your Life
If you are currently in a situation where you hate your job, your boss treats you like shit and you really want to do something entirely different, then you have the complete choice to leave that job and go do something else. You alone are responsible for changing your career and finding something that is in alignment with your true goals.
If you are surrounded by negative people, your friends suck and are boring, you have nothing in common and you really only hang out with them because you have known them for a long time, then you have the power to stop hanging out with them and look for new friends. Nothing is stopping you.
Yeah, it might suck for a while, yeah you might be alone and feel lonely for some time, but ultimately you have the power to change it. Nobody forces you to hang out with people you don’t really feel like hanging out with.
If you don’t like the way you look, maybe you carry around a bit too much fat and you tell yourself it’s because of your genetics or the way your parents fed you, then you have the power to change it. You have the responsibility to go to the gym, change your diet, then you get yourself a new haircut, buy some new fitting clothes, work on your posture a little and boom, you look 10 times better.
If you have a bad relationship with your parents then you’ve got the power to distance yourself from them. Nobody forces you to stay with them. It’s just society that portrays this picture of the ideal family but you don’t have to fulfill this ideal especially if your family situation sucks. Move on, completely break up the contact for some time, do something crazy that you always hold back because of them (just don’t go on a revenge trip that you’ll regret later – I am talking about bad tattoos and the likes …). Let go and work on healing your emotional traumas.
If you suffer from social anxiety, you are shy and lack confidence, you have trouble talking to and meeting people, then you have the ability to actually change it. You might think you are born with your shyness, but at the end of the day, you are responsible for it. You need to break out of it by talking to everyone you see for example and working on healing your traumas and the root cause that actually causes your lack of self-worth.
It might be tough, painful and you might embarrass yourself on the way, but slowly you will get over yourself and beat something that always felt unbeatable – you will be a completely new person.
It starts with realizing that you actually have the power to change everything, even if it’s just a tiny little change. In the beginning, you might have thought that all of these things are set in stone, it’s someone else’s fault or bad circumstances and bad luck that have caused these things. And that might be true. But it’s not until you start taking responsibility that you are actually able to do something about it – and once you do take the responsibility, you will quickly see your life transform in front of you.
5 Steps To Taking Radical Responsibility
Taking responsibility starts with your mindset. It’s about realizing your power to change anything and your ability to respond to situations.
Then it’s all about actually committing to taking full responsibility in your life and following through with it.
Here are 5 steps to taking 100 percent responsibility for your life.
Be Brutally Honest With Yourself
The first step to taking radical responsibility is being brutally honest with yourself. It’s about taking a good, unfiltered look inside yourself and seeing where you actually give away your responsibility and blame it on excuses.
Being honest with yourself might be painful, but it’s the only way to actually begin changing things. The alternative is staying a victim and always blaming others for the rest of your life, instead of facing the truth.
Stop Blaming Others, Circumstances or Yourself
As we already discussed, taking responsibility doesn’t mean taking the blame. To break through this mental prison of blaming, you need to completely banish the concept of blame out of your life.
It doesn’t serve you. All it does is make you grief against others – righteously or not – and keep you powerless.
Get rid of blaming others, circumstances and even yourself and get to work. Start taking responsibility, by forgiving and releasing your grief, and then take responsible action towards a better life.
Realize Your Infinite Power To Change
Even if your situation looks hopeless, even if you didn’t do anything, you still have the ability to respond to a situation in a more resourceful way. A way that gives you even the slightest power.
If it’s just changing the way you think about a certain situation and stop blaming things. Start with that and go from there.
Plus, there are a lot more things that you are more responsible for than you think.
Nobody forces you to keep working at your shitty job, let negative people decide over your life, to sleep in every day, spent your free time watching TV and playing video games, eating cake instead of an apple, keep on laying on the couch instead of getting your ass to the gym.
Generally speaking, you have caused all the things in your life. You could be in a totally different situation if you would have taken other choices. So be responsible and start taking the choices that move you in the direction of your dream life.
Commit Yourself To The Path Of Responsibility
Now that you know it’s possible to actually change your situation, it’s time to battle your inner demons and fully commit to taking radical responsibility for everything in your life.
It’s about making the decision to actually take the full responsibility for every single thing in your life. Even if it is completely absurd or you really aren’t the cause for it, you still do it.
It’s a mindset shift that you have to completely internalize.
Take Massive Action!
This is the most important step and the step that most people forget.
It’s one thing to understand these principles and another to actually live by them and follow through.
Now is the time to hustle with discipline towards taking radical responsibility and do everything that you can each day, to work towards betterment instead of blaming others or running away from your responsibility.
Identify what you can change, research it, make a plan and then follow through with that plan. It’s that simple. Instead of thinking it’s not possible and accepting your fate, you make a plan how you will actually change your fate.
If you find yourself in day-to-day situations where you want to blame others or try to look for excuses, start taking responsibility and search for a way to change it for the better. People will respect you as a person of true integrity
Where I Have Been The Last Few Months (& Why I Fuc*ed It Up)
As you might have noticed over the last few months, I was pretty inactive and haven’t posted anything. I gave away my responsibility.
When I started Next Level Rebel, I committed to writing one article per week or every other week.
Somewhere around fall last year, I noticed I haven’t written anything in months already. But what was the cause?
I was working my ass off to build my businesses and online projects, make more money, become more successful – and I still currently am.
And at times I was really successful and it was a lot of fun. But there was something eating at me. A feeling of me not being true to myself. I knew what it was, but I kept ignoring it.
I am talking about neglecting this site. The first week of not writing an article passed, then the second, then the third and soon months have passed and I still haven’t written anything. The more time passed, the harder it was to come back and each time I tried, I had no idea what to write. I was lacking inspiration and the momentum was gone.
And I am the only one to blame.
My excuse was not having enough time and being too busy. I didn’t want to spread my focus too thin because I already doing that to a great degree and only write another article when everything was running smoothly again.
But the work didn’t stop and I didn’t know where to get more time either. I already banished all timewasters like watching TV or playing video games out of my life years ago. And I was sleeping 5 hours on average every night.
I had totally legitimate reasons, yet I wasn’t completely honest with myself.
There was a lot of time of me keeping myself busy for the sake of being busy. Doing small tasks that didn’t really do anything. Even for this website. Instead of writing an article, I started redesigning elements of the site or improving old articles. All valid things, but not the most important things – especially when you are limited on time.
I haven’t watched TV in years but all of a sudden I was watching a lot of YouTube videos and didn’t even notice it. These were informational type of content that was supposed to teach me something important for my business but to be honest, 90 % of it could have been avoided.
I could go on and on with examples but the point is, I wasn’t brutally honest with myself and I fuc*ed up along the way.
It was time to take the responsibility for myself and be honest and realize it wasn’t the lack of time, but my misuse of it. I wasn’t even doing it intentionally and was trying to manage it efficiently, yet I lost the sight of what is truly important.
As you can see, I am not perfect by any means. It happens to the best of us in different areas of our lives. The important thing is realizing it and picking yourself up on the right path again.
Before I was on this path of crushing it, becoming the best version of myself and reaching for success in life, this was the standard way of dealing with things. Blaming others, using poor excuses. Everybody was against me and I was the victim.
Only when I took full responsibility for my life was when I made massive changed and went from average unhappy Joe, to above-average and making massive progress in all areas of life.
You will often fail in your life. Especially when you start out on new projects and ventures, you will likely fail. The importance is in picking yourself up from the ground, learning from it and taking responsible action in the direction of your dreams.
I will be posting regularly now again. My deepest apologies to all the readers that were waiting for new articles but were dissapointed week after week. It would have been easier to blame it on my insane work hours, but I wouldn’t be taking full responsibility for my actions and you might still not read this article right now. 😉
Dan is back!
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