Let’s get straight to the point here: people enslave themselves by refusing to leave the plantation of their conditioned thought patterns and behavior.

As the classic author James Allen once said:

Tuesday’s post was called “The Essential Nature of Self-Discipline,” and that essential nature is PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY.

The bottom line is that you’ll never go far in life if your first response to a challenges is, “okay, let me go out and change this thing,” or your first response to a problem is “look…it’s because this other person did this thing wrong.”

You cannot change the physical world with immediate physical force; you can only adapt and transform yourself so as to consequent different results. Your experience is a reflection of who you are internally are, and to the extent that you’re avoiding this truth, you’re enslaving yourself to the external environment. You’re giving your power away (because responsibility IS power) to parameters over which you have no control.

I talked about this in my post about pet-peeves earlier this week as well: you’d be surprised how many people agree with this inner-outer thing theoretically that still refuse to apply it in their own life…

James Whittaker (the first American to successful climb Mount Everest) once said, “You never conquer a mountain, because mountains can’t be conquered; you only conquer yourself…” and that’s an extremely insightful point:

When you accomplish something, the thing itself did not change, YOU DID in order to accomplish it. The man who climbed a mountain CLIMBED a mountain (the mountain itself did not change), the man who created a successful business CREATED a successful business (the economic environment itself did not change to adapt to him), so on and so forth. Accept this as common sense and apply it to your life as often as possible.

So if every time things go wrong, you tend to allocate fault (focus on what another person did wrong or why a situation isn’t fair), STOP. In fact, whenever you catch yourself in the act, hold your wrist together as if they were bound by cuffs and then force them apart as if you were breaking free and then say to yourself “I take responsibility.”

Begin with the small things (why the garbage wasn’t taken out, why there was a mis-communication or anything else inconsequential…my pet peeves list has good examples) and the larger things will take care of themselves. Also, stay away from people who whine and complain because negative energy is infectious.

If you want to turn things around in your life, start by accepting reality the way it is. Stop deceiving yourself about why you have the problems you do, and then from there, work on letting go of your old habits, faulty paradigms and other negative tendencies so that you can evolve into what your particular situation demands of you.

Peace,
+B





>> Bryan’s List of Pet-Peeves: 5 Things That TICK ME OFF (great follow-up read)
>> The Essential Nature of Self-Discipline
>> A Life-Changing Perspective that Empowers You to Create Results
>> Conquer Yourself: A Blogging Series on Personal Productivity
>> Check out a FREE mixtape I put together a few months back…