No Excuses! - The Power of Self-Discipline Part 4

-J. PAUL GETTY.

Your ability and willingness to discipline yourself to accept personal responsibility for your life are essential to happiness, health, success, achievement, and personal leadership. Accepting responsibility is one of the hardest of all disciplines, but without it, no success is possible.

The failure to accept responsibility and the attempt to foist responsibility for things in your life that make you unhappy onto other people, inst.i.tutions, and situations completely distort cause and effect, undermine your character, weaken your resolve, and diminish your humanity. They lead to making endless excuses.

MY GREAT REVELATION.

When I was twenty-one, I was living in a tiny apartment and working as a construction laborer. I had to get up at 5:00 A.M. so that I could take three buses to work in order to be there by 8:00 A.M. I didn't get home until 7:00 P.M., tired out from carrying construction materials all day. I was making just enough money to get by, and I had no car, almost no savings, and just enough clothes for my needs. I had no radio or television.

It was the middle of a cold winter, with the temperature at minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, so I seldom went out in the evening. Instead, if I had enough energy, I sat in my small apartment at my little table in my kitchen nook and read.

One evening, late at night, as I was sitting there by myself at the table, it suddenly dawned on me that "this is my life." This life was not a rehearsal for something else. The game was on, and I was the main character, as in a play.

It was like a flashbulb going off in my face. I looked at myself and around me at my small apartment, and I considered the fact that I had not graduated from high school. The only work that I was qualified to do was manual labor. I earned just enough money to pay my basic expenses, and I had very little left over at the end of each month.

I suddenly knew that unless I changed, nothing else was going to change. No one else was going to do it for me. In reality, no one else cared. I realized at that moment that, from that day forward I was completely responsible for my life and for everything that happened to me. I was responsible. I could no longer blame my situation on my difficult childhood or mistakes I had made in the past. I was in charge. I was in the driver's seat. This was my life, and if I didn't do something to change it, it would go on like this indefinitely, by the simple force of inertia.

This revelation changed my life. I was never the same again. From that moment on, I accepted more and more responsibility for everything in my life. I accepted responsibility for doing my job better than before rather than doing only the minimum that was necessary to avoid getting fired. I accepted responsibility for my finances, my health, and, especially, my future.

The very next day, I went down to a local bookstore at my lunch break and began the lifelong practice of buying books with information, ideas, and lessons that could help me. I dedicated my life to self-improvement, to continuous learning in every way possible.

For the rest of my business life, right up to the present moment, whenever I've wanted or needed to learn something to help me, I have returned to learning, to reading, to listening to audio programs and attending courses and seminars. I found that you could learn anything you need to learn in order to accomplish any goal you set for yourself.

Over time, I learned that fully 80 percent of the population never accepts complete responsibility for their lives. They continually complain, criticize, make excuses, and blame other people for things in their lives about which they are not happy. The consequences of this way of thinking, however, can be disastrous. They can sabotage all hopes for success and happiness later in life.

From Childhood to Maturity.

When you are growing up, from an early age you become conditioned to see yourself as not responsible for your life. This is normal and natural. When you are a child, your parents are in charge. They make all your decisions. They decide what food you will eat, what clothes you will wear, what toys you will play with, what home you will live in, what school you will attend, and what activities you will engage in during your spare time. Because you are young, innocent, and unknowing, you do what they want you to do. You have little choice or control.

As you grow up, however, you begin to make more and more of your own decisions in each of these areas. But because of your early programming, you are conditioned unconsciously to feel that someone else is still responsible for your life, that there is still someone else out there who can or should take care of you.

Most people grow up believing that if something goes wrong, someone else is responsible. Someone else is to blame. Someone else is guilty. Someone else is the villain and they are the victim. As a result, most people make more and more excuses for the things in their lives, past and present, that make them unhappy.

Get Over the Mistakes Your Parents Made.

If your parents criticized you or got angry with you for mistakes you made when you were growing up, you began to unconsciously a.s.sume that somehow you were at fault. If your parents punished you physically or emotionally for doing or not doing something that pleased or displeased them, you felt inferior and inadequate.

When your parents withheld their love to punish you for not doing something they demanded, you might have grown up with deep feelings of guilt, unworthiness, and undeservingness. All these negative feelings could then intersect to make you feel like a victim, like you were not responsible for yourself or your life once you became an adult.

The most common feeling that we have as adults if we have been raised in a critical home environment is the feeling that "I'm not good enough." Because of this feeling, we compare ourselves unfavorably to others. We think that other people who seem to be happier or more confident are better than us. We develop feelings of inferiority. This can become an emotional trap.

The Fatal Fallacy.

If we think for any reason that others are better than us, we unconsciously a.s.sume that we must be worse than they are. If they are "worth more" than we are, we a.s.sume that we must be "worth less." This feeling of inadequacy or worthlessness lies at the root of most personality problems in our lives as well as most political and social problems in our world, both nationally and internationally.

To escape from these feelings of guilt and worthlessness that have been instilled in us as the result of destructive criticism in childhood, we lash out at our world, other people, and situations. In any part of our life with which we are unhappy or discontented, our first reaction is to look around and ask, "Who's to blame?"

Most religions teach the concept of sin, which states that whenever something goes wrong, someone is to blame. Someone has done something bad. Someone is guilty. Someone must be punished. This whole idea of guilt and punishment leads to ever-increasing feelings of anger, resentment, and irresponsibility.

An Att.i.tude of Irresponsibility.

Our courts today are clogged with thousands of people demanding redress and payment for something that went wrong in their lives. Backed up by ambitious plaintiff lawyers, people go to court demanding compensation, even if they themselves are completely at fault for what happened-especially if they are at fault.

People don't want to accept responsibility. People spill hot coffee on themselves and sue the fast food restaurant that sold them the coffee in the first place. People get drunk and drive off the road and then turn around and sue the manufacturer of the fifteen-year-old car they were driving. People climb up on a stepladder and lean over too far, falling to the ground. They then sue the ladder manufacturer for their injury. In each case, people are attempting to escape responsibility for their own behaviors by blaming someone else, making excuses, and then demanding compensation.

Eliminating Negative Emotions.

The common denominator of all people is the desire to be happy. In its simplest terms, happiness arises from the absence of negative emotions. Where there are no negative emotions, all that is left is positive emotions. Therefore, the elimination of negative emotions is your great business in life if you truly wish to be happy.

There are dozens of negative emotions. Although the most common are guilt, resentment, envy, jealousy, fear, and hostility, they all ultimately boil down to a feeling of anger, directed either inward or outward.

Anger is directed inwardly when you bottle it up rather than expressing it constructively to others. Anger is directed outwardly when you criticize or attack other people.

Psychosomatic Illness.

Negative emotions are the major causes of psychosomatic illness. This occurs when the mind (psycho) makes the body (soma) sick. Negative emotions, especially as expressed in the form of anger, weaken your immune system and make you susceptible to colds, flu, and other diseases. Uncontrolled bursts of anger can actually bring about heart attacks, strokes, and nervous breakdowns.

Here is the great discovery: All negative emotions, especially anger, depend for their very existence on your ability to blame someone or something else for something in your life that you are not happy about.

It takes tremendous self-discipline to refrain from blaming others for our problems. It takes enormous self-control to refuse to make excuses.

It takes tremendous self-discipline for you to accept complete responsibility for everything you are, everything you become, and everything that happens to you. Even if you are not directly responsible for something that happens, like hurricane Katrina, you are responsible for your responses, for what you do and say from that moment forward. It takes tremendous self-mastery for you to take complete control of your conscious mind and deliberately choose to think positive, constructive thoughts that enhance your life and improve the quality of your relationships and results. But the payoff is tremendous.

Blaming Is Easy.

By following the path of least resistance, the easiest and most mindless behavior of all is for a person to lash out and blame someone else anytime anything goes wrong, for any reason.

People who develop the habit of automatically blaming often become angry at things. Blaming inanimate objects when they do not function as expected is so silly that it almost becomes a mild form of insanity.

People become angry at doors that stick. They swear at tools they are using when they themselves make a mistake. They get mad when their car doesn't start. Even if it is an inanimate object, if it doesn't work perfectly, then the thing must be to blame. People will often kick a car that they are mad at or a box that they tripped over.

The Antidote to Negative Emotions.

The fastest and most dependable way to eliminate negative emotions is to immediately say, "I am responsible!" Whenever something happens that triggers anger or a negative reaction of any kind, quickly neutralize the feelings of negativity by saying, "I am responsible."

The Law of Subst.i.tution says that you can subst.i.tute a positive thought for a negative one. Since your mind can hold only one thought at a time, when you deliberately choose the positive thought, "I am responsible," you cancel out any other thought or emotion at that moment.

It is not possible to accept responsibility and remain angry at the same time. It is not possible to accept responsibility and experience negative emotions. It is not possible to accept responsibility without becoming calm, clear, positive, and focused once more.

As long as you are blaming someone else for something in your life that you don't like, you will remain a "mental child." You continue to see yourself as small and helpless, like a victim. You continue to lash out. However, when you begin to accept responsibility for everything that happens to you, you transform yourself into a "mental adult." You will see yourself as being in charge of your own life, and no longer a victim.

In Alcoholics Anonymous, people who are having problems with drinking attend meetings with others going through the same situation. What they have found is that until the individual accepts responsibility for his or her problems, both with alcohol and in other areas of life, no progress is possible. But after the person accepts responsibility, everything is possible. This is true with almost every difficult situation in life in which you project your unhappiness onto other people or factors outside yourself.

Money and Emotions.

Many of our biggest problems and concerns in life have to do with money: earning it, spending it, investing it, and, especially, losing it. As a result, many of our negative emotions are a.s.sociated with money in some way. However, the fact is that you are responsible for your financial life. You choose. You decide. You are in charge. You cannot blame your financial problems or situation on other people. You are in the driver's seat.

So it is only when you accept responsibility for your income (who chose to accept the job you are working at?), your bills (who spent the money that put you into debt?), and your investments (who made those decisions?) can you move from being an "economic child" to an "economic adult."

Responsibility and Control.

There is a direct relationship between the acceptance of responsibility and the amount of personal control you feel you have over your life. This means that the more you accept responsibility, the greater sense of control you experience.

There is also a direct relationship between the amount of control you feel you have and how positive you feel. The more you feel that you have a high "sense of control" in the important areas of your life, the more positive and happy you are in everything you do.

When you accept responsibility, you feel strong, powerful, and purposeful. Accepting responsibility eliminates the negative emotions that rob you of happiness and contentment.

In every situation, the antidote to negative emotions is to say, "I am responsible." Then look into the situation to find the reasons why you are responsible for what happened or for what is going on.

Your intelligence is like a double-edged sword: It can cut in either direction. You can use your intelligence to rationalize, justify, and blame other people for things you are not happy about, or you can use your intelligence to find reasons why you are responsible for what happened and then take action to solve the problem or resolve the situation. You can make excuses or you can make progress. You choose.

Even if an accident has occurred, such as your car being damaged in the parking lot while you are at work, you may not be legally at fault for the accident. But you are still responsible for your responses, for how you behave as a result of what happened.

Never Complain, Never Explain.

The mark of the leader, the truly superior person, is that he or she accepts complete responsibility for the situation. It is not possible to imagine a true leader who whines and complains rather than taking action when problems and difficulties arise.

This sense of "response-ability" is the mark of the highly developed personality: You take responsibility for your life by resolving, in advance, that you will not become upset or angry over something that you cannot affect or change. Just as you do not become angry about the weather, you do not become angry over circ.u.mstances and situations over which you have no control.

Furthermore, you especially do not allow yourself to be angry and unhappy in the present because of unhappy experiences or situations from the past. You say, "What cannot be cured must be endured."

It is amazing how many people are unhappy today because of a past event, even something that happened many years ago. Each time they think of the negative experience, they become angry or depressed once again. The good news is that at any time, you can stop thinking about, discussing, and rehashing the past. You can let it go and begin thinking instead about your goals and your unlimited future. As Helen Keller said, "When you turn toward the sunshine, the shadows fall behind you."

Self-Mastery and Self-Control.

Any self-discipline, self-mastery, and self-control begin with taking responsibility for your emotions. You take charge of your emotions by accepting 100 percent responsibility for yourself and for your responses to everything that happens to you. You refuse to make excuses, complain, criticize, or blame other people for anything. Instead, you say, "I am responsible," and then take action of some kind.