E + R = O

“You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself.” Jim Rohn – America’s foremost business philospher

The title of this post caused a major fundamental change in the way how I viewed life. Essentially the formula stands for:

Event + Response = Outcome

How many times have we blamed a certain event for the lack of your results. We get involved in a vicious cycle where we start blaming external events and become victims of them and are left feeling helpless. We blame our team mates, business partners, bosses, co-workers, political climate, environment, traffic, computers, internet and just about anything to convince ourself that we are not the ones to be blamed. The fact of the matter is that all of this circumstances do exist in the world we live in. It is how we react and adjust accordingly what matters.

That is where the “R” or your response comes into the equation. When you experience an outcome that you don’t want in whatever you are doing or experiencing go back and analyze yourself as to how you could do it differently.

For example if there is a particular co-worker at your workplace which you feel is limiting your growth or is making it difficult for you to work at your optimal. Instead of just cursing the day he/she was hired or transferred to your division and telling your friends how awful work has become; we need to change our response so that we get the outcome we desire (which could be to go back to a normal working environment where you feel you can work in a productive and optimal manner). So in this case we could either talk directly with the person who has been troubling you, if that doesn’t work you could talk to the manager of your division and as a last resort you can bring the problem to the attention of the HR director. Either way we must always strive to align our thoughts with the outcomes that we expect.

In business there have been times when we have launched marketing campaigns that we thought were brilliant and were surely to succeed. However when the results weren’t there I always remind my team to analyze every step of the campaign and to get feedback as to where we may need to alter our strategy. In life we will always come across road blocks and it is very easy just to stand there and wait for someone else to move them. Sadly in most circumstances if you want to move forward the onus is going to be on you to move it out of the way and move forward.

By doing this you will be taking 100% responsibility for your life. You wont be blaming external factors rather you will using them to get valuable feedback and changing your responses to make sure what you get out of life!

So do you take 100% responsibility for your life?

Journey of a Serial Entrepreneur Facebook Application

Filed under: Inspiration, Change, Formula, Responsibility