“The moment you take responsibility for everything in your life, is the moment you can change anything in your life”
– Hal Elrod –
This has been a really big learning for me over the last few years, and continues to be something that I am always striving to do in my life. So I just wanted to share this sentiment with you today.
In my previous life (as I now refer to it) I spent a lot of time blaming others for why I wasn’t happy. And at the time, that was absolutely perfect, because I didn’t know any better.
Now a few years later, after having done a lot of work on myself and my psychology, having studied NLP, life coaching and having read a tonne of books, I am now aware of the notion of Cause and Effect or causality as it is also known.
According to Wikipedia causality is a philosophical concept ‘in which an action or event will produce a certain response to the action in the form of another event.’
Buddhists also refer to this as karma. Literally karma means ‘action’ or ‘doing’, and it can also be described as (also according to Wikipedia) ‘whatever one does, says or thinks is a karma.’ and it ‘is used specifically for those actions which spring from the intention of an enlightened being.’
So, why is it important to know about Cause and Effect and karma and how can it improve your life?
Living in Effect
When we live in effect, we have basically submitted ourselves to the fact that we are not in control of our lives and whatever happens is nothing to do with us.
I have spent the majority of my life living in effect. Not ever being very sure about where I’m going and what I want to achieve. Just bumbling along, allowing life to happen to me, rather than take control and making it what I want it to be.
I would react to things that would happen to me, and generally believed that my lack of happiness, satisfaction and contentment in life was a result of things outside of me. I wasn’t taking responsibility for the design of my life.
This all came to head around my 30th birthday. I was in a job that I hated, I was in a relationship with someone who I didn’t want to marry or have children with, I didn’t like the city that I was living in, and I was feeling completely and utterly hollow and unfulfilled.
I blamed my boyfriend at the time for how I felt, I blamed my job, I blamed London, I blamed the weather, I blamed pretty much everyone and everything apart from myself. When in actual fact, I was the only person that had created this situation and I was the only person who could change it.
Living in Cause
This is when we take 100% responsibility for everything in our lives. We are aware that everything we are attracting has been caused by our thoughts and actions.
When I first learnt about the notion of Cause and Effect last year it was pretty confronting. It meant that I had to take complete responsibility for everything in my life, the good and the bad (this is especially tricky).
I had to take responsibility for the fact that I had attracted a toxic relationship, because I was in a toxic place. I had to accept that I had attracted a frustrating job in a negative space, because it was just a reflection of where I was in that moment. The list goes on . . .
It was pretty tough to accept and understand that I created a really unhappy, angry, frustrating and pretty darn rubbish life situation for myself. But more importantly, on reflection, I was also responsible for deciding to take control, put myself in the driver’s seat of my life, choose to live in cause and make some positive changes.
Not only did I leave my job, break up with my boyfriend and leave London, but I went travelling for 6 months, moved to the other side of the world, got a new job for a while, then started my own company and set up shop in beautiful Sydney where the sun shines pretty much every day. And best of all, I live with the man of my dreams.
I took responsibility for my life. And most importantly, when I started to get really clear about how I wanted my life to be, in a positive way, rather than focussing on all the things that I didn’t like about it and blaming others, things started transform in a really magical way.
There is a great book called the 100/0 Principle that supports the notion of Cause and Effect and is a formula for developing effective relationships in our life.
According to Alan Ritter, the author of the 100/0 Principle, you take full responsibility for the relationship (the 100) and expect nothing in return (the 0). The paradox is that as you take authentic responsibility for the relationship, the other person does as well. Therefore the 100/0 Principle quickly transforms to something approaching 100/100. There is a short You Tube video that explains how it works and the 3 simple steps to follow to implement it in your life.
And this can all be linked to the idea of karma in that, if you do good things and treated others well with kindness and compassion, then it will come back to you in equal measure.
So, I guess my question for you today is, what do you need to take responsibility for in your life? And what positive changes can you make today about the things you have been complaining about or making excuses for, for too long?
“The happiest people in the world are those who feel absolutely terrific about themselves, and this is the natural outgrowth of accepting total responsibility for every part of their life.”
– Brian Tracy –
Wishing you big long warm hugs, love and light. x x x
Inspiration for this post
The 100/0 Principle – You Tube video
A blog post about Cause and Effect from a guy I love to follow called Myrko Thum
Kat Kinnie's Blog 