Accept Responsibility
When I’m doing P90X or P90X2 or Insanity or the Asylum, I have great results. When I drink Shakeology, it helps me keep my nutrition on track. When I plug in to my team’s weekly calls, I’m able to keep excited about my opportunity through helping others by coaching them through their programs. When I follow through on recommended reading and audio, I find myself having a more positive mental attitude and not letting things get to me as much. When I communicate with my wife, I find we don’t have nearly as many disagreements.
When I don’t do these things, though, my life falls apart!
I could sit here and type all day long about things I’ve been told recently, or things that people have observed and commented back to me about just by using constructive criticism. There are plenty of lessons, and plenty of times I could have really gotten upset. There are even a few times that I DID get upset. No one likes to hear they’re not perfect. No one likes to hear they have faults.
Lately, though, I find myself welcoming these thoughts, comments, events, challenges. I feel like they’re making me a stronger person – a better person.
In the past, if I recognized a phone number on the caller ID as someone who wanted something from me, I’d shy away from it. Just this week, I had an incident of this very magnitude. I decided I needed to brave the phone call. Yes, they wanted something from me, but upon facing the music and hearing what they wanted from me, I was able to fully understand what exactly they wanted and find out that it was actually a complete mistake on their part. They didn’t need anything from me after all, but it took facing the music and communicating with them to come to that conclusion. Now, rather than getting emails, letters, and phone calls, I just need to call them back once in the next 30 days with the information showing that what I told them is true, and I’m done with that issue.
Here’s another example. We’ve all done things in our past we’re not exactly proud of. Maybe it was something that happened to you, that you just had no control over. Without getting into too many details, I was discussing a similar subject with someone at church recently. We were sharing experiences that were just completely astounding that God had blessed us with. We were also discussing the shortcomings we’d had in our relationship with God since then and questioning why we would, as humans, turn our backs from God in that manner. I shared with him an instance in my past that most people would shy away from someone that admitted these problems. Again, not getting into detail, but it’s something that doesn’t just happen overnight. Things lead to other things, and it gets out of hand, and results in some pretty bad stuff that you’re not proud of. The thing is, I didn’t share those things, just the really bad stuff I had done. Mind you, I’m not best friends with this gentleman, but I do believe there’s a mutual respect between us. He didn’t judge me for my past. In fact, I believe he respected me for coming out and accepting responsibility for my own actions. Would you like to know something else? It felt good accepting responsibility and not blaming it on supposed circumstances, or events that might have led up to it.
I’m reminded of recent events in the news with gun control laws. There are people picketing with signs saying better gun control laws are needed. There are others saying that criminals won’t listen to laws anyway – so, we’re getting it from both sides of the fence. I saw a photo recently of one of these people holding just such a sign, with another person standing next to him with a sign reading “Spoons and forks made me fat.”
Accepting responsibility for your own actions is a difficult task. It’s so easy to blame someone or something else. Can it be done overnight? Yes. It really can. Will your attitude change, or will you feel the effects and see the benefits immediately? Probably not. I still struggle with this mindset myself, but I’m trying, and I’m really starting to see the benefits.
Stop and look in the mirror, watch what you put into your body for nutrition or fuel, admit when you’re making a mistake and learn from it and move on. Realize that if what you’ve been doing for so long hasn’t been working, then maybe it’s time to look at another avenue or another method of doing these things.
In regards to health and fitness, especially if you’re looking at a Beachbody workout program, I’d love to help you with those to achieve your desired goals. Send me a message using the “contact” link on this page so we can get started!
