Sunday 19 April 2015

Good role models: Part I Acceptance of responsibility

I knew I was moving in the right circles when I heard several people take responsibility for recent setbacks that they had experienced.

A colleague who had been staying up very late every night for a week trying to restore his PC told me that he had completely messed up an installation. There was no cursing and swearing, no blaming the software manufacturer, the PC, the instructions… just an admission that he had bungled the upgrade. 

The same man got into some trouble with property and finances; he told me that he had listened to bad advice from an estate agent and not to good advice from friends in the property business.

Another example came from someone who had to dismiss her incompetent assistant and re-do all the work he had done on the database. She said that she made a big mistake when she recruited him: she had ignored a few doubts and based her decision on what was on his CV, disregarding her intuition.



Someone else told me that she was dreading an impending meeting with some people who had retained her to raise funds for their projects. She was going to have to tell them that the results to date were very disappointing. She admitted that she had perhaps been over optimistic about how much money she could bring in and had raised their hopes to an unrealistic level. 

In my opinion, accepting personal responsibility where appropriate is an attribute of the best people. It is one of the signs of a real adult, of someone who makes a good role model. 

Unfortunately many of us had no one to set a good example when we needed it most.  In childhood we were surrounded by people who blamed everything and everyone except themselves for all their problems and pain. It was always someone or something else’s fault.

Conversely, people sometimes behaved as if they were personally responsible for saving the rest of the world - by overthrowing the capitalist system for example - while neglecting and avoiding their real, personal responsibilities. 

After growing up among people who were terrible role models, we may find it difficult to escape from the wrong side of the tracks. We may be trapped on a low vibrational frequency level. The way out and up is via understanding these issues and developing the good characteristics inside ourselves so that we become a good role model for others.

I have tried to take responsibility where appropriate in my own life, for large and small problems. For example, I had some work done in my bathroom and take responsibility for some aspects that are not to my liking. I should have told them in advance what I wanted; I should not have assumed that tiles would be laid in a certain way. If I feel overloaded, I don’t always blame people for making demands; where appropriate I blame myself for bad scheduling.

Like attracts like: we can tell that we have arrived, know the right people, been invited to the right parties and joined the best clubs when the people around us display the attributes that we have learned to value.