Taking Responsibility or Accepting Responsibility?

If you’ve ever had a reading with me, or you’ve studied with me or just had any kind of conversation or discussion with me, you will know how much I bring up being responsible for your own life. I know that it’s something that I bang on about all the time, possibly to the point where people don’t want to hear it any more.

But I have to ask the question – how much do you take responsibility for your life?

I’ll tell you why.

There is a difference between accepting responsibility and taking responsibility. And the difference is this : When you accept responsibility, you’re saying ‘yip I messed up, I’m sorry, I won’t do it again’ and it ends there. When you take responsibility, you say ‘I messed up, I’m truly sorry – what can I do to set it right and how can I behave moving forward so that I don’t mess up in the same way again’.

When you take responsibility for your life, you make it a choice to consciously be aware of yourself. To consciously be aware of how you behave. To consciously be aware of how you make people feel. To consciously be aware of how you treat yourself and how you treat others.

When you take responsibility for your life, you learn to not accept second-best. You learn that you owe it to yourself, to want better for yourself all the time. You learn that you are important and that by recognising that you are important, you automatically move away from being the victim or the player in your life and you move into the driving seat and know that it is only through the actions and decisions that you take, that you create your life. You learn that if you are going to give your power to someone else, you cannot expect to receive what you can give to yourself. You learn that happiness lies within you, it is something that you create through taking responsibility for your life. It isn’t something that lies out there in the great big wide yonder. It isn’t something that someone can gift to you.

When you take responsibility for your life, you develop self-awareness – something that so many of us struggle with. Taking responsibility is not easy. Being self-aware is even more difficult. Being self-aware, means that you recognise yourself and every flaw that you have. It also means that within the recognising that you are a human being struggling though this life, just as everyone else is, you can take action to consistently be working on yourself, to make yourself a good and decent human being. To make yourself less quick to pass judgement. To make yourself more empathetic. To make yourself more compassionate. To make yourself always aware on the effect that you have on someone else’s life. But to also make you all these things towards you too.

If you don’t want to be seen as or feel like, the victim in your own life – like a pawn in this great big journey that we’re all walking through together, then taking responsibility for your own life, is the only way to do it. Show up for yourself. Show up for others. Be the version of the perfect person you have in your head. Let people understand and see who you are, through your actions, not through lip-service. There’s a beautiful song called More than Words by the band Extreme and I’m going to end off with those beautiful lyrics here :

Saying “I love you”
Is not the words I want to hear from you
It’s not that I want you
Not to say but if you only knew

How easy, it would be to show me how you feel
More than words is all you have to do to make it real
Then you wouldn’t have to say that you love me
‘Cause I’d already know

What would you do
If my heart was torn in two?
More than words to show you feel
That your love for me is real
What would you say
If I took those words away?
Then you couldn’t make things new
Just by saying “I love you”

La-di-da, da-di-da
Di-dai-dai-da
More than words
La-di-da, da-di-da

Now that I’ve tried to
Talk to you and make you understand
All you have to do is close your eyes
And just reach out your hands and touch me

Hold me close, don’t ever let me go
More than words is all I ever needed you to show
Then you wouldn’t have to say that you love me
‘Cause I’d already know