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I was a victim. The universe seemed to have a personal vendetta against me, people discarded me. I lived like this for years, playing the victim card and wallowing in my misery because a part of me wanted to feel defeated. It wanted recognition. I wanted people to feel sorry for me and hand life to me on a platter, without needing to lift a finger, just feeling sorry for myself.
But that never happened. Nobody came to my rescue. Nobody seemed to care. Thank god nobody did, because otherwise, I wouldn’t have taken the long road out of the victim mentality by taking self-accountability, and taking my life into my own hands.
This was the best decision I ever made because my life began transforming in beautiful ways. It doesn’t matter how hard I had it, feeling sorry for myself only made it worse.
This might not be the message you want to hear. After all, the victim mentality can be a particularly tricky trap to find yourself in, but you need to understand that nothing will change unless you take responsibility for it. If you feel defeated in your life situation, hoping for someone to come to the rescue, you must come to the rescue. The only way to do this is via self-accountability.
Self-accountability is the practice of taking responsibility for your actions, decisions, and their outcomes. It means to be critically honest with yourself and consistently evaluate what’s going wrong in your life, and how you can fix it. By holding yourself accountable for your life situation, you can finally begin crawling out of this miserable trap that so many of us find ourselves in.
In this article, you will learn the importance of self-accountability, and how to feel responsible for your circumstances so that you take action to improve your life situation. Feeling accountable for your life is an essential part of anyone who wants to achieve happiness. You simply won’t while you feel at the mercy of the world.
The importance of self-accountability
Self-accountability is a staple for personal development. When you hold yourself accountable, you actively reflect on your life and assess your situation which leads to recognizing areas for improvement and taking steps to address them. By being responsible for your actions and their consequences, you become more disciplined, focused, and capable of achieving what you want to do.
If something goes wrong in your life, instead of pointing the finger, you’ll look at why this happened to you. You will learn from your mistakes and take steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. During the multiple times I’ve been robbed in my life, at first I played the blame game. I blamed the people who robbed me. I blamed the universe. I deferred responsibility, and you know what this led to? A whole lot more pain.
By the 3rd time I was robbed, I instantly brought it back to myself. Sure, it sucked, losing your phone in a violent robbery is never fun, but I took responsibility for the situation and wondered how I went wrong. What actions and decisions led to these circumstances, and how could I be smarter about it in the future?
I learned my lesson, and quickly healed from the incident, rather than marinating in my pain and feeling sorry for myself. This was a much better course of action, but it did require me to put my ego aside and step up.
But it’s not just learning how to manage ourselves in the physical. Self-accountability also plays a big role in personal development and spiritual growth. Let’s have a peep at some of the ways that self-accountability can aid your personal growth and development:
- Building Resilience: Feeling accountable for everything you do builds resistance. You will always strive to fix your mistakes and find better ways of doing things. Likewise, you will see through a lens where everything you do is within your control, one way or another, which keeps you moving forward.
- Sustaining Growth: Self-accountability is important for personal growth. We grow much more slowly when we refuse to acknowledge our failures and setbacks, or what we’re doing wrong. By taking accountability for your life and everything you do within it, you put yourself on a fast track for growth.
- Enhanced Self-Esteem: You start building your confidence when you feel accountable for what you do. You will realize that you are more competent than you give yourself credit for, as opposed to playing the victim and believing everything is outside of your control.
- Better Relationships: Self-accountability leads to maturity. If you hurt your partner and brush it off, it’s going to create issues down the track. When you can acknowledge when you’ve made mistakes or screwed up in your relationships, and make up for it, your relationships become much healthier and happier.
- Increased Productivity: When you feel accountable for your work, you are likely to be more productive. You will continuously look for opportunities for improvement, and this can keep your eyes on the prize without getting discouraged or losing interest.
Regarding spiritual growth, self-accountability encourages introspection and honesty which allows you to align your actions with your values and beliefs. This alignment facilitates a deeper connection with your inner self and helps you move forward. When you take responsibility for your spiritual journey, you become more aware of your thoughts and behaviors, leading to greater self-integration.
Someone who struggles with addiction might take ownership of their recovery process by seeking help and making the necessary lifestyle changes. Their accountability not only helps them overcome their addiction but also strengthens their character.
Likewise, anyone who is creating a business needs to take accountability. They can’t just look at their statistics, blame the external world, and quit. Well… they can, and many people do, but they’re not the people who create successful businesses. Rather, someone who does take self-accountability will evaluate their mistakes and make strategic adjustments.
By feeling accountable for your life, you set the stage for growth. This is what it’s about, but if you prefer to point the finger because life isn’t going the way you want, then be my guest. Let’s see where it gets you.
How to develop self-accountability
If you’re stuck in the victim mindset where everything happens to you, it’s in your best interest to take responsibility for it. It can be a long road until you genuinely feel accountable for your experiences, that’s why you need to take one step at a time to develop with frame of viewing your life, and everything you do in it.
You may struggle to take self-accountability because you fear the consequences of stepping up to the failures that happen in your life. Let’s face it, it’s easy to point the finger, that’s why so many people do it. Nobody wants to feel like they’re messing up, especially if that mistake has repercussions. This is where honor plays a critical role, by being integral to yourself and accepting that sometimes we need to take it on the chin, for our own good. Likewise, some people may be overwhelmed by the situation or not know how to apologize, so they don’t.
People may also avoid accountability because of their egos. They want to assume that they are always right and that the fault is always someone else’s. In this sense, the ego can be an obstacle, and people with big egos tend to shy away from self-accountability. Ever met someone like this? It’s a real nuisance and they never learn.
Just to be clear, taking accountability for your work, actions, and life in general is not the same as blaming yourself. Self-blame comes from a disempowered place and can be quite negative. Self-blame is a similar energy to feeling victimized (you can victimize yourself), while self-accountability is empowering. You’re taking responsibility for the results of your actions for the sake of improving yourself.
Therefore, the energy is different. One is low-vibrational, the other is high-vibrational.
There are some key ingredients in self-accountability:
- Self-awareness: You need to understand your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and decisions. Without an awareness of why you’re doing what you do, you’re bound to continue making the same mistakes.
- Self-responsibility: To feel self-accountable, you need to take full responsibility for everything that happens in your life. If you don’t feel responsible for what happens, you’re not going to pick up the pieces, adjust, and improve.
- Motivation: You need to feel some sort of motivation to take action and put in the work to improve. You can spiral into blame and resentment very quickly if you don’t work up the motivation to improve.
- Honesty: You need to be very honest with yourself because honesty creates transparency. This transparency illuminates what you need to do moving forward. If you aren’t completely honest with your mistakes and setbacks, then you are likely to defer blame and end up doing nothing about it.
Practical tips to develop self-accountability
- Set clear goals:ย Part of being self-accountable is knowing what you’re working towards. If you don’t know what you’re moving towards, how will you know where to improve, and when you went wrong? Therefore, set clear goals, whether they are financial, personal, or spiritual, so you can monitor your progress.
- Reflect, often: Self-reflection is important because this is when you will gain insights and a deeper understanding of what happened, and why it happened. If you don’t reflect, you’re missing out on crucial information you could use to better yourself.
- Take small steps: Be consistent with your efforts and take small steps daily towards the things you want to achieve. If you’re not making progress, you’re never going to get where you want to go.
- Learn to stand up for yourself: One behavioral change you can make is to start standing up for yourself more. After recognizing this feeling, think about what actions need to be taken to empower yourself. What could you do that would make you feel like you’re being treated with respect? Do you need to say something, assert your boundaries, or leave the situation?
- Stop exaggerating: This is a big one. When we feel like victims, we tend to exaggerate our situations to earn sympathy votes. Be mindful if you tend to stir up little things into big issues. Not everything needs to be an issue, and you need to recognize when you’re turning something into a problem when it wouldn’t be for other people.
- Take responsibility for your downfalls: It’s important to take responsibility for your mistakes. As long as you keep pointing the finger at other people, or for your misfortune, you’re not going to take back your power. You need to own your mistakes, and when you do the world will no longer be to blame. Your life will be in your hands, as with your failures and successes.
- Reinforce the idea that you’re not a victim: How are you going to feel powerful in yourself when you believe that other people are responsible for what happens to you? As someone who wants to be empowered, you are responsible for everything that happens to you, even if it wasn’t your fault. Therefore, reinforce this idea so you don’t slip into old patterns.
- Start being grateful for what goes right: One of the best ways to develop self-accountability is to work on your gratitude. A sense of gratitude for your life will compete against the ‘poor you’ mentality because it’s training you to be grateful for your experiences.ย