The acceptance of complete responsibility for your life means that you refuse to make excuses or to blame others for anything in your life that you’re not happy about. You refuse, from this moment forward, to criticize others for any reason. You refuse to complain about your situation or about what has happened in the past. You eliminate all your “if only’s” and “what if’s” and focus instead on what you really want and where you are going.
If you are not happy with any part of your life, say, “I am responsible” and get busy changing it. If something goes wrong, accept responsibility and begin looking for a solution. If you are not happy with your current income, accept responsibility and begin doing those things that are necessary for you to increase it. If you are not happy with the amount of time you are spending with your family, accept responsibility for that as well and begin doing something about it.
When you accept responsibility, you feel personally powerful. The acceptance of responsibility gives you a tremendous sense of control over yourself and your life. The more responsibility you accept, the more confidence and energy you have. The more responsibility you accept, the more capable and competent you feel.
The acceptance of responsibility is the foundation of high self-esteem, self-respect, and personal pride. The acceptance of personal responsibility lies at the core of the personality of every outstanding man or woman.
On the other hand, when you make excuses, blame other people, complain, or criticize, you give your power away. You weaken yourself and your resolve. You turn over control of your emotions to the people and situations you are blaming or complaining about.
You do not escape responsibility by attempting to pass it off onto other people. You are still responsible. But you give up a sense of control over your life. You begin to feel like a victim and see yourself as a victim. You become passive and resigned rather than powerful and proactive. Instead of feeling on top of your world, you feel as if your world is on top of you. This way of thinking leads you up a blind alley from which there is no escape. It is a dead-end road on which you should refuse to travel.
See Yourself as Self-Employed
When you accept complete responsibility for your life, you begin to view yourself as self-employed, no matter who signs your paycheck. You see yourself as the president of your own personal service corporation. You see yourself as an entrepreneur heading up a company with one employee — yourself. You see yourself as responsible for selling one product — your personal services — into a competitive marketplace. You see yourself as completely responsible for every element of your work, for production, quality control, training and development, communications, strategy, productivity improvement, and finances. You refuse to make excuses. Instead, you make progress.
Your personal company, or any company, can increase its bottom-line profits in one or more of three ways. First, the company can increase its sales and revenues, holding costs constant. Second, the company can decrease its costs, holding sales and revenues constant. Or third, the company can do something else altogether where one or both of the first two are possible. As the president of your own company, these are your three options as well.
Identify the things that you can do that are more valuable and important than all the others. You then discipline yourself to focus all of your energy and attention on those specific tasks. You just say “No!” to any activity or demand on your time that is not consistent with the most valuable work you can possibly be doing at that moment. You are responsible.
Whatever You Concentrate On, Grows in Your Life
Life is the study of attention. Where your attention goes, your heart goes also. Your ability to direct your attention away from activities of lower value to activities of higher value is central to everything you accomplish in life.
In 1928, at the Hawthorne Electric Plant of General Electric, a group of time and motion experts conducted a series of experiments aimed at increasing the productivity of workers based on varying the working conditions and the environment in the plant.
The researchers selected a group of women who worked on a production line assembling motors. They explained to the women that they were going to be experimenting to find the very best combination of working conditions to assure the highest level of productivity with the smallest number of mistakes. These women had been chosen to be the subjects of the experiment.
They then began their experiments by raising the light levels in the production area. Within a couple of days, production went up and defects went down. The researchers were delighted with these results.
They then lowered the lighting levels to test the differences. But to their surprise, production levels went up once again. They experimented with other working conditions. They raised and lowered the noise levels. They raised and lowered the room temperature. They altered the seating arrangements and the work order of the employees. But in every case, levels of productivity went up. The researchers were completely baffled by these results.
Finally, they sat down with a focus group of the workers and explained to them what they had found. They asked them, “Why do you think it is that production levels have gone up, no matter what variables we changed in the working conditions?
The answer they got back was surprising. The participants told the researchers that they had never before been singled out and treated as anything other than simple factory workers. When they were chosen to be subjects of this experiment, their levels of self-esteem and self-respect had gone up. They felt better about themselves. They felt more important. As a result, they did their work even better than they had ever done it before. Each change in the working conditions reminded them that they had been specially selected for this study. They worked harder and better. And their productivity increased.
This breakthrough at the Hawthorne Electric Plant triggered the management revolution that has totally changed the world of work as we know it today. It was the discovery of the psychological factors of production that led to the breakthrough work of management researchers such as Maslow, McGregor, Herzberg, Drucker, and many others. Today, thousands of the very best minds in the world are committed to improving the psychological factors that contribute the very most to higher levels of productivity and output in every work situation.
Improvement Is Automatic
What psychologists and others have discovered is that the very act of observing a behavior tends to change that behavior for the better. This is one of the greatest breakthroughs in the understanding of personal performance. Within this critical discovery is contained the key to your dramatically improving the quality of any area of your life.
Sometimes I ask my seminar audiences this question, “Imagine that there are several researchers from the local university in this room. Imagine also that these researchers will be observing you and writing a report later on how well you personally took notes during this seminar. Would that have any effect on your note-taking ability?
Everyone smiles and agrees that, yes, if they knew that they were being carefully observed and evaluated on their note-taking ability, they would pay much more attention to the way they took notes. They would be much more aware, and they would do it far better than if no one was watching.
This point is simple yet profound and important. When you observe yourself engaging in any activity, you become more conscious and aware of that activity, and you do it better. When you pay attention to any element of your behavior, you will tend to perform far better in that area than you would if you were not paying attention, or if you had not thought about it at all.
The power of clarity is that you learn how to identify the most vital actions and behaviors in each area, the ones that can bring you the greatest rewards and results in the shortest period of time. When you then consciously focus on these areas, you will perform better and better. This process of continuous improvement will happen naturally and easily by the very fact that you have put an “X” on the important behavior in advance.
The Law of Increasing Returns
There is a “Law of Increasing Returns” that applies to your use of this process. This law says that the more you focus on doing those few things that represent the most valuable use of your time, the better you become at those activities and the less time it takes you to accomplish each one. Your returns on effort and energy increase the more of them you do. This is another key to doubling your income and doubling your time off.
The Efficiency Curve
This phenomenon is often referred to as the “Efficiency Curve.” This curve explains why some people earn several times as much as other people in the same field. It also explains why some companies produce far more of a product or service, at a consistently high level of quality, and at a lower price than others. They can then pass their lower production costs on to their customers, sell for less, and undercut their competitors, thereby increasing their market share and their profits. This efficiency curve is the key to your success as well.
This curve looks like a ski slope moving from the left to the right. When you begin work on a new job or activity, you usually have to invest a good deal of time and effort to accomplish any results at all. This is the learning phase. But if you persist, you will eventually get better and better at that particular task. As you get better, you begin moving forward and downward along this curve, taking less and less time to get the same quality and quantity of results. Eventually, you will reach the point at which you can produce in one hour what a new person might take several hours to produce. Meanwhile, the quality of your work will still be equal to or greater than the less experienced person who is spending many more hours to do the same job.
Your Habits Determine Your Destiny
Fully 95 percent of everything you do is determined by your habits. From the time you get up in the morning to the time you go to sleep at night, your habits largely control and dictate the words you say, the things you do, and the ways you react and respond. Successful, happy people have good habits that are life enhancing. Unsuccessful, unhappy people, unfortunately, have habits that hurt them and hold them back.
Fortunately, all habits are both learned and learnable. You can learn any habit that you consider either desirable or necessary, if you are willing to work at it long enough and hard enough.
A habit can be defined as an automatic or conditioned response to stimuli. A habit, good or bad, is something that you do naturally and easily, without thought or effort. Once developed, a habit takes on a momentum of its own, controlling your behavior and your responses to the events in your world. Once formed, a habit does not go away. It can only be replaced by a newer, better habit. “We form our habits and then our habits form us.”
The German philosopher Goethe once wrote, “Everything is hard before it is easy.” You may need to exert tremendous discipline to develop new habits of thought and behavior. But once you have them firmly locked in, they enable you to accomplish vastly more, with less effort, than ever before.
Good habits are hard to develop but easy to live with. Bad habits are easy to develop but hard to live with. The habits you have, and the habits that have you, will determine almost everything that you achieve or fail to achieve.
Your job is to form good habits and make them your masters. Simultaneously, you must diligently work to eliminate your bad habits and free yourself from the negative consequences that accompany them. Identify the habits that can help you the most, and how you can most rapidly develop them.
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