Let’s start off with what does personal responsibility really mean?

Taking care of your commitments, being accountable, making your own decisions/choices.

So, what happens in our lives when we are taking personal responsibility? What happens when we hold ourselves responsible for our own, well, ignorance?

There is a freedom we feel from being 100% honest with ourselves. We are not meant to be victims or apathetic people laying around, hoping something comes along and changes our lives because only two things change.

1) Something new does come into our lives and it changes our direction, changes our insight, changes who we are.

2) Something new comes from within you.

Pretty black and white. Either one or the other will happen. Not complex at all. Brendon Burchard states that “we have five main responsibilities in our lives and if we take control of each of these areas of our lives, a new power will come.” Here they are…

OUR AIM

Our AIM is ambition, desire, goals, and dreams.

Successful people go for it. They set an intention. They set a direction and move towards it. They understand the difference between accountability and blame.

Their AIM is specific.

They really do see where they are going and what they want. They prepare to get on the path and understand they could be there for a while. Even if they do not know exactly where they are going, they are entering a new phase of their life where they truly feel that this journey is their own versus just being carried along by their parents, their professors, their peers, etc. It is their own – they have their own AIM in life.

What do you want next week to be about?

If you do not know then you are, for lack of a better word, aimless, and when you are aimless it is pretty easy to feel very lost. It is like you kind of wander around the world.

The world is a field of crazy.

All these people have all their wants and wills, and if you do not have your own direction, if you have not set your own life agenda, they will set one for you. So you have to direct your own AIM.

OUR ATTENTION

Where is your attention going each moment of the day? The ability to be fully present is really just guiding one’s attention to this moment, giving ourselves an alertness, an intention, and awareness to the very now that we are experiencing, that is power.

When you are most attentive to your life, to the moments that you experience it can be pretty amazing.

Most of us are being guided again, by the aims of others so we are taken from our own attention of what really need to be focusing on.

Most people’s attentions are not…they are not paying attention to what they need to be paying attention to based on their goals, their desires, their dreams or demands and responsibilities of life; they are paying attention to the distraction that showed up.

Now, of course, there will be distractions, it is going to happen. There is always a lot going on around us. But we do need to look closely at what the distraction is. How much is it pulling me off of our path? Are you putting more energy into the distraction than yourself?

OUR ATTITUDE

How are you meeting life?

Are you meeting life energized, excited, enthusiastic and positive? Are you alive and you can’t wait for the next moment to unfold? Or is it more like, “Well, here we go again”?

Either way…it is a choice.

It is hard to imagine anyone choosing to have a bad attitude.

But it is the truth. Eventually, it becomes part of our personality. Which means the attitude is closed. It is angry, upset or bordering on the negative emotional qualities of life, rather than realizing the incredible possibilities and experience that we all have available to us…every single day.

In order to see it through, your attitude needs to be open to it.

When your attitude is open to it. When your attitude is open you are allowing yourself to learn and to connect with other people. When your attitude is open finding happiness is not something you do..it is something you create.

You choose the attitude of happiness.

You do not have to have happiness, you generate it. You generate your attitude.

Everything learned in psychology over the years is that you can literally change your attitude, just by controlling your thoughts and directing them in a new, positive, healthy, social way.

So, why not do that? Choose to have a good attitude.

Wake up every morning and decide.

OUR AFFECTIONS

Directing our affections. Our affections, in terms of our emotional quality in life, but also those that we care for. We need to take responsibility for the amount of love we are giving our loved ones. We need to hold ourselves accountable around others.

OUR ACTIONS

Our actions are our behaviors.

What is it that we are doing every single day? Who we become is a result of our disciplined actions, not our random initiatives that we do once in a while.

Our personal responsibility in being able to control our actions and guide them towards healthy and positive outcomes for ourselves, that gives us extraordinary confidence, an extraordinary sense of progress in life.

When we are confident in who we are and we are confident in our progress towards where we are moving, then it is easier to sense happiness.

It all comes from being responsible for these five things. Aim. Attitude. Attentions. Affections. Actions we take each day.