Some people have a lot of misfortune in their lives, while others are handed everything. When you accept that life isn’t fair, it’s easier to stop blaming the world and to play with the hand of cards you were dealt.
Let’s face it, the world can be a ruthless place. Life is going to hit sometimes, and there won’t be anything that you can do about it. To add insult to injury, sometimes it will be uncalled for, and you’ll be left with an important decision to make.
Am I going to play the victim, blaming the world and pitying myself? Or am I going to take control of the situation, leverage it for my growth, and get on with it?
One path is a nosedive into powerlessness. Other people might even give a shit for a moment, but sooner or later you’re going to be left alone wallowing in your own self-pity, dependent on the world to cater to your every need.
On the other hand, if you take responsibility for the things that happen and understand that sometimes, life just isn’t fair, that’s a fast track to real self-empowerment.
So how can you turn your misfortune into a blessing? How can you leverage your unfair life situation to become much more empowered than people who have so much, but are dependent on things going right? Radical self-responsibility is the key.
Why radical self-responsibility is a spiritual game changer
Radical self-responsibility is an approach to life that involves taking complete ownership of your life’s outcomes. It’s the understanding that you’re the sole creator of your reality, where everything that happens within it is a manifestation of your consciousness.
Understanding that your reality is dependent on your consciousness is the key to radical self-responsibility. You need to acknowledge that you shape your destiny, regardless of the challenges you face or the past experiences that have held you back. You are responsible for literally every aspect of your reality, even the things that are out of your control.
Radical self-responsibility encourages you to be the driver of your life’s journey, rather than a passenger. Simply put, your life changes in beautiful ways on both an internal and external level when you fully acknowledge that you create your reality, one way or another.
In this sense, when you understand your role as a creator, you start working the strings of life a little differently. This allows you to take control of your life trajectory, and achieve a quality of life that most people don’t (even those who are given everything).
Self-responsibility vs radical self-responsibility
Self-responsibility refers to taking accountability for your thoughts, beliefs, and everything that results from your actions. Radical self-responsibility is a more wholesome, spiritual outlook of this phenomenon, where you take responsibility for everything that happens in your life.
The secret here is to take responsibility for the things that weren’t in your control. If a bad situation happens to you, radical self-responsibility is to explore why you attracted that particular thing to happen, and what lesson it serves. Self-responsibility is needed to be a capable and independent adult.
Radical self-responsibility leads to a deeper sense of empowerment and spiritual wholeness.
Are you ready to take control of your life?
If you want to be in control of your life, it starts by taking responsibility for every single occurrence that happens within it. The reason why so many people play the victim is because it’s easy to be the victim. It’s easy to defer responsibility by pointing the finger at something else, whether it’s a person, the government, or god.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who or what you think is responsible for your life situation. And that’s the thing. If you think that anyone, or anything besides yourself is responsible for your life situation, then you need to try harder.
Embracing radical self-responsibility isn’t just about shifting blame: It’s about recognizing your capacity to create positive change within, and outside of your own life. When you take control of your life, you cultivate some powerful intrinsic qualities that change your life experience for the better.
Self-responsibility vs victimhood
The antonym for radical self-responsibility is the victim mentality.
The victim mentality is where you believe that external forces control your life and that there’s nothing you can do about it, but blame. As we’ve discussed in other articles, blame is a dense energy that certainly isn’t going to help you attract the life situation that you actually want.
But people blame anyone and anything anyway because it’s the easier pathway to cope with a difficult, or unfair situation. But victimhood is also a catch-22.
When people give off the negative energy of victimization, they start attracting negative things into their lives in the form of thoughts, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and situations. Things go downhill, so they blame even harder, giving away more of their power until their life becomes a concoction of blame, powerlessness, and resentment.
Victimhood is a cycle that I see so many people get sucked into. The only way to get out of it, or avoid it is to cultivate an awareness of it and start building radical self-responsibility to overturn that table. Below are a couple of resources to further explore the victim mentality, and why it will ruin your life.
Signs of vicimhood
- Blame shifting: People with a victim mentality usually shift blame onto other people. They rarely take responsibility for their actions.
- Helplessness: People with a victim mentality often feel powerless to change their circumstances. They believe their happiness is dependent on others.
- Resistance to change: People with a victim mentality tend to resist change out of fear that it will disrupt their familiar, but unhappy status quo.
- Lack of accountability: People with a victim mentality rarely acknowledge their role in creating their circumstances. It’s easier to point the finger when you defer responsibility.
Impact of the victim mentality
- Stunted Personal Growth: Believing that you’re not in control of your life prevents you from taking the necessary steps to grow, learn, and improve.
- Strained Relationships: Constantly writing off problems to external sources can strain your relationships as it leads to an inability to reason.
- Negative Self-Image: A victim mentality can erode your self-image, leading to feelings of inadequacy.
- Unfulfilled Potential: By having a victim mentality, you’re simply not going to view your life situation in a way that instills optimism, hope, excitement, and all the good things that encourage you to make the most of your life experience.
Spiritual victimhood
Spiritual victimhood is something I also want to address here. Essentially, spiritual victimhood is using a facade to pretend you’re all spiritually developed and empowered, but you blame spiritual phenomena for your actions, behaviors, and so forth.
How often do you hear people in the spiritual community say ‘I lost my shit at someone and screamed at them, but it’s Mercury retrograde, so it’s not really my fault’. Ever heard that before? How about ‘The full moon made me a little bit crazy last night, sorry about that!’
Whether these phenomena actually do have an influence on you or not doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, you’re still blaming something else for your own actions, and you’re trying to shift accountability to something else besides yourself.
How can you get out of the victim spiral?
Radical self-responsibility is the antidote to the victim mentality.
The victim mentality is a very disempowering view of life where everything happens to you. You have no control over it and you deserve all the sympathy in the world because life isn’t fair. Radical self-responsibility leans in the other direction – towards empowerment.
People who have a victim mentality view themselves as helpless in the face of life’s challenges. They often see themselves as passive recipients of life’s outcomes and view their difficulties on external factors such as luck, other people, or circumstances beyond their control.
To get out of this spiral, you need to understand that it’s not the challenges you face or the situation that you find yourself in that defines you as a person. It’s how you handle these challenges. So do it with dignity and honor. Be humble with your life. Because if you’re not, life can be a merciless teacher.
Practical Steps to Embrace Radical Self-Responsibility
When things go wrong, especially when they’re out of your control, the first instinct is to react. But it’s easy to react, it’s hard to think about why you manifested this situation. By taking responsibility for what you do, and the effect that your actions have on your life, you are going to push towards better things with better outcomes.
take accountability for everything that happens to you
Let’s say you were caught in traffic and arrived late to work. It’s easy to blame traffic, but perhaps you should have left early if you had any suspicion. Even if you didn’t and there’s nothing you could have done, you need to acknowledge that you are arriving late and that it’s your error.
Not to say you need to take the blame for everything that happens, but it’s important to acknowledge everything that affects other people. It might not be your fault, but it is your responsibility to follow up with your commitment and make amends if you can’t do what you said you would do.
On the other hand, if your phone slips out of your hand and breaks, instead of yelling at your phone, you should turn that attention to yourself.
Don’t beat yourself up about it, but maybe you shouldn’t have been holding your phone, or you should have been more careful with it. The first step to taking radical self-responsibility is to take accountability for your actions.
Learn from your mistakes
You don’t want to go in circles with your life. What I mean by this is if you don’t learn from your negative experiences, you’re bound to keep repeating them. In the context of radical self-responsibility, if you never take responsibility, there’s always going to be something to blame.
That’s why you need to learn. Especially when something goes wrong, think about what you could have done differently to have changed the outcome. A big part of personal development simmers down to your ability to reflect, process, and pick up patterns. So pay attention when you feel like shoveling blame, and remember to bring it back to yourself.
Make conscious decisions
Every cause has an effect. By correlating the cause and effect of every behavior, action, attitude, or thought, you’ll begin to see that everything you do has an outcome. Whether that outcome works in your favor or not comes back to the thought process that created it, which is why you need to be conscious about your decisions.
Realize that the energy you’re putting out will be returned in some form. If you put your energy into your work, the energy you receive will be money. If you put your energy into your growth, you will receive greater fulfillment. Therefore, be conscious of every little decision you make and know that those decisions all build up to create your life experience.
Don't attach yourself to the outcome
It’s good to have plans and to move towards goals, but you shouldn’t be dependent on those outcomes for your happiness. When your satisfaction is independent of your material situation or life condition, it’s going to be a whole lot easier for you to accept outcomes that you didn’t expect, and to take responsibility for them.
Your metric for a fulfilling life should be to experience it. At the end of the day, it shouldn’t matter how much shit you go through, and how much misfortune you have had. As long as you are present with your life experience instead of endlessly hoping, desiring… you’ll see that the outcome of your life doesn’t matter, as long as you did your best to enjoy it.
Practice Self-Compassion
A big part of radical self-responsibility comes down to showing yourself compassion. Don’t be too hard on yourself, because things aren’t always going to go your way. And it’s okay when things don’t go your way, or when you fail, or make mistakes.
Recognize that you are a human being who isn’t perfect. Accept imperfections and maintain a positive self-image, regardless of how much you muck up. Also, don’t let it get you down! Be forgiving of yourself as you work through the challenges of life. Understand that changes take time, so apply this self-compassion to this learning process too.
Taking responsibility for what is out of your control
Now that we’ve looked at the things you can do to take control of your life, radical self-responsibility is to feel accountable even for the things that happen to you that aren’t in your control.
There’s a fine line when it comes to taking accountability for everything. This can also spiral in a negative direction if you play the martyr or pity yourself. But genuinely believing that you have power over every situation that you go through in life can also be the most liberating experience you can imagine.
This is the yin dynamic of radical self-responsibility as it involves your perception, mindset, and outlook on life, typically from a spiritual perspective. Before doing so, I suggest reading the article below for context.
Your life is a manifestation of your consciousness
If you follow my work, you’ll understand that reality is malleable. Your consciousness creates your entire life experience and calls in the lessons it needs to go through in this life. From a spiritual perspective, you are creating the difficult lessons in your life for your growth and evolution. Deep down, you chose these hardships.
Once you learn the lessons you need to learn, things will ease up and life will become much easier to navigate. If you believe this, then how can you blame externally when you know you’re the reason for literally everything you’re experiencing? Realize that all of this is coming from your reality, not someone else’s.
Your soul chose this life
You chose to be here. You chose all of these difficulties, all of the trauma, all of the dysfunctions you would face. At a soul level, you chose to be born into poverty, because your soul needed to experience that particular lesson to evolve. You chose to lose someone close to you, because, from a spiritual perspective, your soul needed to mourn.
You might not want to believe this. If you’ve been through something very traumatic, of course, the natural instinct is to blame whoever was responsible for causing that suffering. That’s fair. But if you really want to do this thing, you’ve got to get beyond the ego that wants to play the martyr, because your soul chose to experience that particular lesson for its own spiritual growth.
Build the muscle of gratitude
Gratitude is of the highest frequency we can experience. As gratitude signals that things are going great, when you build the muscle of gratitude by expressing appreciation as much as you can, your entire reality is going to change. Therefore, if you want to take radical self-responsibility, start pushing yourself to be more appreciative.
It doesn’t work the other way around. Life doesn’t hand you things then you become grateful. You become grateful for the little things, and life will start giving you more because it’s reciprocating to your vibration.
If you’re in a constant state of blame, your vibration is constantly going to be low, meaning you’re constantly going to be attracting more unpleasant experiences because they match the vibration. So turn this ship around, and take responsibility for your emotions, knowing they create your reality and aren’t dependent on it.
Below are a couple of resources to help you get a footing on vibration, and a tool to raise it.