Responsibility, responsibility - life's full of it, enough already, give me a break! Read about it, too?! Why should I? It is important? You better believe it! Your ability to respond - responsibility - plays a  key role in shaping your life and your destiny. It is so important that all by itself it can make the difference between success and failure.

What IS Response-Ability, Anyway?

Your personal ability, or lack thereof, to respond to life - to broken relationships, broken teeth, canceled flights, winning the lottery, landing your dream job, finding the love of your life, ice cream and bad dreams - determines how you perceive life and therefore, how you handle the challenges and opportunities that come with it. Let's say your ability to respond is one foot tall and the challenge or opportunity in front of you is six feet tall, you would back off, versus the other way around you would take it in stride. Whether the size of the ability and of the obstacle is real or not is immaterial - your perception alone counts. You get the drift.

For many years, the ability to respond was even believed to be the key factor between success and failure. In the meantime we know conclusively it is not your response-ability, but your self-image. But the two are closely linked and enhancing one automatically enhances the other, and vice versa, so it makes sense to look at the two together. Increasing your self-image and your response-ability is easy to do, and can be done throughout life, regardless of age. Here's how.

5 Easy Steps To Grow Your Ability To Respond

Step # 1: Some attitudes and emotions will diminish your ability to respond. They are: helplessness, self-doubt, shame, guilt, apathy, regret, fear and anger. (It doesn't mean these are "bad" emotions, only that if entertained for prolonged or excessive periods of time, or even constantly, they weaken your ability to respond).  Move away from these emotions.

Step # 2: Another set of attitudes and emotions will strengthen your ability to respond to life. They are: courage, resolve, acceptance, intelligence, love, joy and peace. Move towards these emotions. Invite them in, entertain them as you would friends.

Step # 3: Stop blaming others. Be responsible. And don't blame yourself, either. Simply do not see setbacks in life as reflecting poorly on yourself or others. Rather, see the setbacks and successes for what they are - events limited in size and duration - "these too shall pass."

Step # 4: Do not hope for smaller problems, rather work towards growing bigger than your challenges. Step 5 happens naturally, as a by-product of steps 1 to 4, however you can accelerate the process. Remember past successes, regardless of how insignificant they may appear to you know. Remember their significance at the time.

Step # 5: Cease seeing life as alternatively fair and unfair. It is not what life is all about, and doing it anyway is, well, pointless. People in judgment of life are typically concerned about life's unfairness only when they are at the short end of the stick, and more often than not, the perceived unfairness only serves them as an excuse for acting irresponsibly - for blaming others for the “bad” things in their life. To their children they explain that life is not fair and everyone ends up believing it, making  it a self-fulfilling prophesy. But irresponsibility – the unwillingness to exercise one’s ability to respond – eats a hole in the soul of the person who adopts it and over time it spirals out of control. Response-ability is not about how we would respond if we were someone else or if we had someone else's life or if things were different. Responsibility is about how we respond to the hand we have been dealt.

Relevant Quotes

• Learn to wish that everything should come to pass exactly as it does. - Epictetus
• Don't wish it was easier, wish you were better. Don't wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don't wish for less challenge, wish for more wisdom. - Jim Rohn
  
• In dreams begin responsibilities. - W.B. Yeats
• History can be written in a simple little formula: Challenge, Response. - Arnold Toynbee
• The price of greatness is responsibility. - Sir Winston Churchill
• It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously. - Sir Peter Ustinov
• An idea isn't responsible for the people who believe in it. - Don Marquis

Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it - and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections. "My job is to awaken possibility in other people." Give yourself the twenty minutes of this video and you'll find, to your own benefit, he's a master at it.

Related Site:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/09/04/spreadsheet-of-every.html

Are we in control of our own decisions? Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counter-intuitive research findings to show how we're not as rational as we think when we make decisions. (To play, click on the pic)

On the surprising science of motivation - Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. (To play, click on the pic)