It’s time to take responsibility for your own successes and failures, and accept there is no one else to blame or pass the buck onto but YOU.
The truth is, assuming you are an adult, you are responsible for how you feel at every moment. We are in charge of how we think. And thus, since we know that our thoughts trigger our feelings, we are in charge of how we feel. Ultimately, how we think and feel leads to a result.
So, if you are not seeing what you want in your life, and in your business, you need to shift your mindset so that you can take responsibility and become a responsible adult.
Step into emotional adulthood
When we’re functioning as emotional children, we are blaming other people for how we feel, for how we act, and for the results that we’re getting in our life.
I always refer to tennis since I have watched my son play a lot of tennis matches in my day. My son would sometimes say that his opponent was making bad calls. “That’s why I lost.” Or “he was acting strange, he was doing things and walking slowly or looking at the ball in a weird way. And that is why I lost.”
No, the reason you’re feeling crappy right now, the reason you lost is that you didn’t win enough points.
It is not the opponent’s fault. It’s not the opponents’ responsibility. It’s yours. Nobody holds our hand and takes us from this emotional childhood into emotional adulthood.
Our brains don’t fully develop until age twenty-five. But when you’re an adult, you have the brain function, and the processes to be able to understand what you’re thinking.
As children, we don’t have this capacity. In fact, we think that everything is going on in our life because of other things. We think other things, the world at large, is causing our feelings. And this is perpetuated really by how most of us were raised.
We’re made to apologize. I’m not saying it is a bad thing, apologizing isn’t a bad thing, but when we apologize, we take responsibility for someone else’s feelings and ultimately, it’s pretty disempowering.
It’s so ingrained, though, this emotional childhood, that we don’t even realize that we teach each other that other people are responsible for how we feel. It’s the most disempowering thing that we can do, not only for our children but especially for ourselves as adults.
So take my hand, and let’s learn together how to become a responsible adult.
Mindset shifts to OWN your life and your business results
Emotional adulthood is when we decide to take full responsibility for every single thing we feel, no matter what someone else does or doesn’t do. If you are ready to take responsibility for your own success and failures…
#1 Observe your actions
Write down some examples of where you are acting like an emotional child, where you are blaming in your life, and where you are not taking responsibility. Where do you feel entitled to something you haven’t earned? That is when you’re in that place of not taking responsibility for your actions and thinking that they should just happen and that you are entitled to them.
Being an adult does require more effort and it requires a lot more responsibility (and you will need to become more mature!). But it is worth it. It’s so worth taking that step into managing our own lives in our own minds so we aren’t dependent on other people. Ultimately, we get the results we want.
#2 Stop playing the blame game
When we feel a certain way that we don’t want to be feeling, we too often point the finger…Blaming a situation, a person, or a circumstance for our problems, our actions, and our result.
It’s blaming vs responsibility. Children don’t have the capacity to make this distinction. And there really are so many emotional children out there who are functioning as adults. The problem with it is that the most disempowering thing that we can do is to keep ourselves in a space of emotional childhood and blame.
When you recognize when you are blaming and take responsibility, you become more mature and become a responsible adult!
#3 Stop whining
Emotional childhood is that we want others to take care of our needs. We want others to figure things out for us, to do things for us. And if we don’t get what we want, our response is to throw a fit or have a temper tantrum.
Emotional childhood is making our needs the responsibility of someone else, recognizing or believing that we can’t or don’t have the ability to take care of ourselves.
When we are an emotional adult, we take care of our own needs. We make ourselves responsible for handling our own needs. We do things for ourselves and figure things out for ourselves. And if we don’t get what we want, we let it go or do something to change it.
#4 Get in the driver’s seat
It’s fascinating to see people, especially women, take emotional childhood to the ultimate level and want other people to take responsibility for us and take care of us financially.
Some women completely abdicate responsibility not just for their feelings, but for their financial results, and for their life. And they let someone else take care of those things in a way that doesn’t make them feel good. They don’t even like how it feels to have someone else take care of them or pay for everything.
When you are in a place of disempowerment when you’re in a place where you feel like you don’t have control over your emotional life, you give that responsibility to someone else. When we go to the place of really expecting that we will control our own minds, we will control our own feelings.
#5 Be accountable
Ask yourself, do you want to spend your time and energy trying to make you happy because you’re trying to manage your own emotional life? I hope you said yes to that. Delegating that responsibility to even someone that you love can affect that relationship in a really deep and painful way. The best relationships are when two people come together and say, I’m going to meet my needs, you meet your needs, and then we can just come together and have a good time.
If and when you’re in emotional adulthood, you take responsibility for how you feel and you make choices for how you show up. You end up so much more empowered and you get to be the person you want to be instead of being in this default emotional childhood space.
The takeaway
So you wanted to know how to be a responsible adult…The bottom line is that it takes work but the payoff is high! Emotional adulthood says “I’m responsible for my happiness, I’m also responsible for my unhappiness, and I’m responsible if my feelings get hurt. I’m responsible for my thoughts, my feelings, my actions, and ultimately my results.”
People will sometimes ask, “if you’re only responsible for how you feel, then doesn’t that relinquish or take away responsibility for how you treat other people? Does that mean that you can do whatever you want and not worry about the other person’s feelings?”
No. When you are acting from a place of emotional adulthood, you are acting in the best way. You’re acting like your best self. You don’t act in a way that’s mean to other people. You don’t act in a way that’s cruel because you’re acting from a place of trying to get them to behave in a way so that you can feel better. You’re not trying to manipulate their behavior.
This does not mean that you’re not going to take action that is sometimes going to be something you regret or as you reflect, you realize that maybe that was not the best choice. It doesn’t mean that you don’t apologize. It doesn’t mean that you don’t take responsibility for how you treat another person.
Even if you’re not responsible for how they feel, you are responsible for how you behave and the words that come out of your mouth, or what you type into the email. This is really important to understand, It’s really important when you’re learning the mindset shifts to become a responsible adult.
By taking control of your mind – you create your feelings, which in turn drive your actions that determine your results – you create change. I’m going to tell you a lot more about this in the coming months. Subscribe to my newsletter to have them delivered to your inbox!
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