165. Responsibility

Take responsibility. You must always take 100% responsibility for yourself, your actions, decisions, failures etc. You are not responsible for other (adult) people. In any relationship you are 50% responsible. You must live up to your half always. This is what it means to take ownership of your life.

"To do the duty of another is fraught with danger." -The Bhagavad Gita. When you take on the responsibility of the work of another you are on the road to burn-out. You are training the other to shirk his obligations and you are leaving yourself open to attack and lawsuits if something were to go wrong. Mind your own business !

Being responsible has two faces :
1. You are responsible FOR yourself.
2. You are responsible TO others.

Being responsible for yourself means dealing with your feelings, attitudes and behaviours so that they become ever more supportive of your needs and your obligations. Know where the limits are.

Being responsible to others means helping them to do what they cannot do for themselves and ensuring that you treat them with absolute fairness.

If you take on large burdens and try to do it all by yourself, as if this were a part of your normal load then you will be crushed by the burden. Then you will be of no use to yourself or to anyone else. (Irresponsible).

If you act as though your normal duties and responsibilities were someone else's duty, then you are being irresponsible in the other direction.

The penalty for being irresponsible is that you do not have any control of the consequences and you might very well not like how things turn out.

Being responsible does not mean that everything that goes wrong for you is your fault. Responsibility is defined as the ability to respond. You are responsible for how you respond i.e. what your next action will be and for how you interpret the experience but not necessarily the cause of the experience itself.

If you attribute the causes of bad things to yourself your energy drops and the effect on you is Negative. If you externalise it, your energy rises and the effect on you is Positive.

Warning : Others will often try to get you to attribute blame to yourself in an attempt to externalise their responsibilities. This is called laying a guilt trip on you.

Rejections etc., are specific occurances and you shouldn't interpret them as having any long lasting or global significance. The past does not equal the future and if you have done your best (be honest here), then they are not your fault.

The ability to respond means the ability to speak and act effectively and intelligently and not simply react in a knee-jerk fashion.