You Have to Take 100% Responsibility For Everything That You Experience in Your Life

(photo: @paulgilmore_)

If you want to be successful, you have to take 100% responsibility for everything that you experience in your life. This includes the level of your achievements, the results you produce, the quality of your relationships, the state of your health and physical fitness, your income, your debts, your feelings—everything! This is not easy.

In fact, most of us have been conditioned to blame something outside of ourselves for the parts of our life we don’t like. We blame our parents, our bosses, our friends, our co-workers, our clients, our spouse, the weather, the economy, our astrological chart, our lack of money—anyone or anything we can pin the blame on. We never want to look at where the real problem is—ourselves.

If you want to create the life of your dreams, then you are going to have to take 100% responsibility for your life as well. That means giving up all your excuses, all your victim stories, all the reason why you can’t and why you haven’t up until now, and all your blaming of outside circumstances. You have to give them all up forever.

You have to take the position that you have always had the power to make it different, to get it right, to produce the desired result. For whatever reason—ignorance, lack of awareness, fear, needing to be right, the need to feel save—you chose not to exercise that power. Who knows why? It doesn’t matter. The past is the past. All that matters now is that from this point forward you choose—that’s right, it’s a choice—you chose to act as if (that’s all that’s required—to act as if) you are 100% responsible for everything that does or doesn’t happen to you.

― Jack Canfield, The Success Principles