Slide – Taking Responsibility for our actions.
STEP-1
• In Step 1 you’re sitting on the side of the road in the passenger seat of your
own car.
• You say to yourself, “Why is everyone else getting where they want to go?
Why am I not moving? What’s wrong with me? This always happens to me?”
etc.
• Wouldn’t that be insane? YES…it would.
• But that’s exactly what we do when we take no personal responsibility for
what we think, feel, and experience about what happens. We enter a stage of
helplessness and hopelessness. The only way we’ll get anywhere is solely at
the mercy of others.
• Lesson learned: If you don’t take 100% responsibility for your life and
everything you think, feel, and do – then you can’t do anything about it, you
can’t change it and at best you’ll be a really good victim.
• And being a really good victim doesn’t work. You can tell a person is having a
‘stage 1’ moment when they are complaining about how bad life is or how
something ‘awful’ has happened to them.
Here’s what you need to know: It’s just a pattern of behaviour! It’s
not you. A pattern of behaviour is just something you do. Like an
outfit you wear. You are no more your patterns of behaviour than
you are the pants and shirt you are wearing. It’s just something you
put on like an outfit. So, if it’s not working you change it.
STEP-2
• In Step 2 of personal responsibility, you finally realize you’re not going
anywhere because you’re in the passenger seat of your own car. You figure
out that if you want to get anywhere, you’ll have to do the driving. That’s a
good realization.
• So, reluctantly you climb into the driver’s seat of your own car and begin to
drive down the road. But as you do, you start to remember the last time you
drove, what happened, and why you swore off driving in the first place – and
as you do you are so distracted you wreck your car.
• Step 2 is like driving down the highway, pedal to the metal, while looking out
the back window the entire time.
• All you see is wreckage following you, a car swerving off the road here, a ball
of flames over there, and you say to yourself, “See…this always happen to me.”
You then make the assessment about yourself, “Every time I take responsibility
for my life, every time I go for it – something bad happens.”
• You then decide to immediately pull your car over, get out of the driver’s seat
as soon as possible before you do anymore damage.
• This is what we call a step 2 moment. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? Yet this is
exactly what we do when we start to try and take action, but are so stuck in
the past, worrying about what didn’t work out, what bad stuff happened that
is dragging that reality into the present by not looking where we are going.
• Lesson learned – when we are stuck in the past, we can’t see
what’s right in front of us. And when you can’t see where you
are going, you’re bound to bump into things, get lost, and
wader endlessly.
• So the key to transforming the past is to put your attention on
something else and experience the letting go as it washes
away with the next tide.
STEP-3
• In Step 3, you’ve taken back control of your life, you’ve stopped focusing on
the past, and you started focusing on the present moment and what you want.
Focusing on the present moment gives you important feedback needed to
make accurate assessments about what actions will move us towards our goal
most effectively.
• This is also where you finally figure out that if you don’t look where you’re
going you’re going to run into something and cause a wreck. So you realize
being stuck in the past doesn’t work.
• Now, in Step 3 you look where you are going and surprisingly, you stop
running into stuff and start driving straight. Not only are you in control, you
are taking 100% responsibility for everything you think and experience and
that gives you power. Power to start, power to stop, and power to change. It
reminds you that you are manifesting everything in your life and it’s up to you
to create what you want.
• You are not blaming anyone else, any other circumstance, or anything for
what it is and put your attention on each different core area of your life.
• Final thoughts – remember, you can’t always control what
happens to you, but you can control how you respond to it –
and what YOU do next.
Slide – Asking for Help
1. You’re building the people around you.
We often write and talk about the power of appreciation. And although you
may not have considered it before, asking for help is a way to show people
that you trust their ideas, feel competent in their skills, and cherish their
advice. Ask your team for input. Ask them for ideas. Just like real estate, or
stocks, or fine art appreciate with time and influence, you have the power to
appreciate the value of the people who surround you. Yes, recognizing
someone’s talent and skill can come in the form of asking for help.
2. You gain different and varying insights. This one totally flips the idea that
asking for help makes you look weak. The Great Work Study, conducted by
the O.C. Tanner Institute, showed that 72% of people who receive awards for
their work ask for advice, help, insights, and opinions from people outside of
their inner circle. In doing so, those workers generate fresh ideas and
perspectives on how to solve problems that they otherwise wouldn’t have
imagined. In essence, asking for help and advice creates better, stronger, more
successful results than not asking for help.
3. You’ve chosen to protect your greatest asset. The thing you need to
understand if you’re in a position of asking for help—you will eventually break
yourself if you take on too much. The fact that you know you need help is a
protective measure — you can only take on so many tasks, and you can only
consume so much information. In fact, a LexisNexis survey of 1,700
professionals in the U.S., China, South Africa, the U.K. and Australia showed
that typical “employees spend more than half their workdays receiving and
managing information rather than using it to do their jobs.” And 50% of those
workers reported that they were reaching a breaking point.” So, its very
important to keep yourself intact and not break.