Radical Responsibility: Foundation for Control in Your Life
It’s December already, can you believe it? The time from Thanksgiving to the New Year is a funny time. You push pretty hard for almost 11 full months, focusing on your goals for the year. Then, with the pause of Thanksgiving, you focus on what you’ve accomplished, what’s left to do, and what you want to do next year. To me, it’s stressful because you’re focusing on the past, present, and future simultaneously. What exacerbates the stress is when life events keep popping up. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been receiving a decent amount of bad health diagnoses or losses in my friend circle. When that happens, I really start to feel like I’ve lost control of life.
This is where radical responsibility has been helpful to me. I’ve touched on this concept before, but it seemed important enough that I wanted to dedicate a whole article to it. Radical responsibility essentially says that you are responsible for everything that happens to you in your life. This goes deeper than normal responsibility. We understand that others may not respond well when we have been rude. However, radical responsibility goes deeper and even says that the health diagnosis, unexpected divorce, or car accident were also somehow your responsibility.
To be completely transparent, I haven’t fully accepted this concept. It’s a really difficult pill to swallow. However, whenever I’ve been in a difficult situation, whether personal or professional, I felt like I could get my feet on something solid enough to start standing back up again because of this concept.
The mental flip I had to make was believing this challenge was teaching me a critical lesson. I didn’t learn to care for myself until I dated a girl who took advantage of my kindness. I didn’t start taking care of my health and back until I couldn’t walk. As I saw this truth in my own life, I also started seeing it in other success stories. It wasn’t until my dad got his cancer diagnosis that he cleaned up his diet. I had a mentor who used to sell drugs, and it wasn’t until he got shot in the head and lived that he did everything he could to spread good in the world. I have a client who started to bet on herself and take care of herself because her husband asked for a divorce while she was eight months pregnant.
I will say that the transformation feels slow and can be painful internally. However, over time, you transform in the ways I shared above. The people around you will see you months later and say that you’re not the same person. It starts with the small things, such as eating a little more salad and taking a walk or giving yourself the gift of a massage or a bath and lighting a candle.
The result of those small actions builds momentum over time. You realize the reasons you’ve been using have actually been excuses. With each small action, you get rid of one excuse until there are no more excuses.
So, when it comes to taking radical responsibility, I wanted to offer an opportunity to do just that. I'm holding an online goal-setting workshop on Saturday, December 16, 2023, from 9 am-1 pm. You’ll have a chance to review your year and reflect on wins and losses before setting goals for 2024. Care to join me? Sign up here: https://kevin-koo-coaching.ck.page/a1eb37212f
Hope to see you there!
