Radical Responsibility VS. Defensive Deflection
What skill will you cultivate?
Let’s compare them:
Defensive Deflectors:
- Make excuses
- Make up stories
- Spin
- Half-truth
- Avoid tough conversations
- Blame others
- Take things super personally
- Stay small and hidden
- Identify problems, but don’t anticipate or solve them
- Live in their ego
- Live in fantasy and tangled webs of distraction
Radical Responsibility Takers:
- Take 100% responsibility for their reality
- Own mistakes
- Enter the experience of another
- Absorb blame, while distancing from shame
- Embrace vulnerability as strength
- Can be counted on with their word
- Tell the truth
- Live into their truer, more authentic self
- Identify problems and bring creative solutions to life
- Build trust, and repair it when they break it
- Become increasingly more aware of self and reality as it is
I won’t speak for you, but I’ll speak from my own personal experience.
I’m a messy mix of both, depending on the day, depending on the context, depending on the state of my soul.
So the real question is:
Which skill will we cultivate?
The courageous work of radically taking responsibility?
Or the easy, ego-filled road of deflection, deferral, and defensiveness?
Everyone near us will feel the impact of our intention.
So choose wisely.
