What do I understand by “responsibility”?
What do I believe about “responsibility”?
What do I value about “responsibility?”
What do I mean when I say “responsibility”?
Image Source @DevaVenketasamy
PAUSE|BREATHE| REFLECT
Ultimately responsibility is about our responses and our ability to take actions.
To be responsible means to be accountable or to have ownership or to be answerable.
But what are we specifically answerable for?
PAUSE| ASK | JOURNAL
What follows next is a brief of the 4 Power Zone Pattern (every meta-coach licensed under the International Society of Neuro-Semantics, co-Founded by Dr. Michael Hall, goes through this pattern over and over again for his/her own sanity with the intention to best support clients)
We are responsible at two levels
Level Inner/Private
We are responsible for our thinking and feeling – emotional and mental
Thinking: representing, believing, valuing, understanding, reasoning, etc.
Feeling: somatizing, valuing, etc.
This is our inner world and it’s much more complex than what is written out here..
Level Public/Outer
We are responsible for what we say and what we do – linguistic and behavioural
Speaking: languaging, using and manipulating symbols, asserting, etc.
Behaving: acting, responding, relating, etc.
This is what how we bring to surface our inner world into the outer world
To simplify this, we have two innate powers which we develop over time as we age and if provided the right environment, we blossom and own our power fully.
Our inner powers are that of feeling and thinking and our outer powers are that of doing and saying.
The two power zones are interconnected, what lives inside is projected outside.
We are responsible for our thinking, feeling, saying and doing.
Regardless of our depth of compassion, love, care and nurture, we are not responsible for others’ thinking, feeling, saying and doing.
PAUSE| CHECK
How do these above lines sit with you?
I often sit with clients who keep stumbling over this one peak. “ feeling responsible for others’ feeling, thinking, speaking and behaving” and it gets trickier in relating with immediate close ones.
PAUSE| CHECK
Does this sound familiar to you?
On a scale of 0-10, how responsible are you for your partner’s/children’s/parents’/friends’/colleagues’/ others’ feeling, thinking, speaking and behaving? (0 is the lowest score of your being,feeling, living and doing responsible for others’ feeling, thinking,speaking and behaving and 10 is the highest score")
Against what quantitative and qualitative facts have you given yourself the above rating?
Until the age 10, a child cannot dissociate himself/herself from his/her immediate caregivers. He/she believes to hold responsibility for others’ responses, especially the immediate caregivers.
Every child will go through this process as a natural development of his/her cognitive and interpersonal powers and eventually learn to deepen and strengthen his/her innate powers. From this place of ownership, we will see adults owning their power fully and playing an active part in creating their lives.
Truth is, most of us will not move beyond this point. We will age believing, thinking, feeling that we are responsible for others’ responses and others’ are responsible for our responses.
What are the indicators?
BLAME| BLAME | BLAME
Blame is the one ROARING indicator.
Blaming others | Blaming Self | Blaming the World | Blaming our Parents
Blaming our Government | Blaming our Culture |Blaming our History
Blaming our inability to choose otherwise
Blaming our habits
Blaming our past
The higher the level of blame in our life for our past and current happenings, the higher we are out of balance on our power zones.
I see this especially with women who come to me either for coaching sessions or in women circles. Women have been trained for years to give their power away. We give our innate powers away, our power to responsibly create the life we want and this begins with our innate powers of feeling, thinking, speaking and behaving. We live powerlessly for more than often, out of our longing to maintain harmony, we allow our lives to be run by and through others; we hold ourselves responsible for what happen to others both internally and externally. We dim our light in fear of hurting others.
Women who will read this, know what I am speaking of.
Men who will this, I know you are not indifferent to these words. Your world is mirror to ours.
Terrible things happen in life. Challenges, problems, and undesirable events occur. Things go wrong, plans fall apart, relationships end, the best intentions fail to achieve objectives, people trick and cheat us, rob and rape, and do all kinds of bad things.
Endless among us engulfed in deep rooted trauma, we may never step out of feeling, thinking, speaking and behaving as a victim.
For some of us, waking up is our best and we may never heal in this life, we may never be moved enough to own our innate power to feel, think, speak and behave without projecting and/or absorbing others’ realities as the cause to our state.
Space be held for this collective part of us, this part that will not heal in this life time.
For those of us who are willing to be willing to brave this tide, know that to think and feel that you are a victim is a choice.
You can think otherwise.
You can feel otherwise.
You can make that choice.
PAUSE | BREATHE
An invitation into the mind-set of responsibility
To live within and through responsibility, it starts with acknowledgement of one’s powers (inner: to feel, think and outer: to speak and behave), checking where one is on this spectrum, appreciating this awareness and gently moving self in a space of self as the cause and keys to all, one step at a time.
To be able to do that, it calls for several cognitive awarenesses, as below (but the list is not an end in itself)
Take each of these below phrases, give yourself a rating on a scale of 0-10 and with each rating have your quantitative and qualitative evidences to support your rating. (with 0 being this is not your actual experience and with 10 being the highest rating of your experience as a human)
“I’m the person in charge of my thinking, emoting, speaking, and acting.”
“I can hold no one else responsible for what I think, believe, understand, decide, remember, imagine, etc.
“No one makes me or forces me to think or feel anything. My thoughts and feelings are mine, they are created inside my body, and they are created by the meanings that I create about things.”
What do we do next?
Start with creating
What’s important to me?
What are my talents, skills, possibilities? What can I develop?
How do I want to live my life? Relate to others? Invest my energies?
As we dive deeper in owning our inner and outer power, we end up creating a solid sense of independence which then allows us to be healthily related to others in an inter-dependent way (rather than co-dependent). Then with this core sense of responsibility, we know that we and we only are responsible for our health, wealth, mental wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, relationships, work and much more.
Ownership of one’s power often leads to closure of doors to that which engulf us in unhealthy living.
Responsibility is Powerful
Creation happens from a space of responsibly using one’s power
May we create from a space of responsibility
May we be reminded that our acts of responsibility impact ourselves and the collective
May we be brave enough to leave legacy of “power ownership” for our children
Take it slow | There is no rush on this path
Breathe | Rest | Love | Laugh
Love from my heart to yours
Megha Venketasamy
Image source: @DevaVenketasamy Post © Megha Venketasamy, 2020. All rights reserved.
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