It’s Sunday, 6:17 AM. I’m running my first run in a long time, loving the freshness and quietness of early morning. After 5 minutes of relentless protest, my legs accepted that I’m not going to stop and have started cooperating.

Holding Myself Back

I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging the past few days, and it’s been on my mind for several weeks now. I’m not really satisfied with how thing are going, and that’s not due to circumstances. It’s because of me.

I came to realize that I’m holding myself back. I’ve been trying to define my blog, to define “How to be an Original”. But I kept bumping into a barrier, something that stopped me from being satisfied with whatever definition I came up with. Until it hit me last Sunday (bear with me on this one).

I realize now that I started with the definition process months back already. The topics I blogged about were as the things on my mind, very diverse. And at the same time I was reading blogs about blogging, like ProBlogger, to learn more about blogging. One of the things I learned was that it’s best to choose a (niche) topic or a (niche) demographic and write specifically for them. Especially if you want to earn a buck from them.

I also received some feedback that it wasn’t all that clear what the blog was about. With this and the advice on blogging, I took a good look at my blog. And I limited the subjects somewhat, so it would fit more closely to productivity or self improvement.

Fast forward a little and I’m coming up with all kinds of topics that I’m interested in. I want to write about them and often even draft a post already. Only to decide later on that they don’t fit my blog. And I put them in storage, with a saddened heart.

Personal Blogs…Yuck (No More)

You know, I looked down upon personal blogs before last Sunday. There are a gazillion of them out there, with people writing about their <insert pet here> puking over the carpet, the recent visit a restaurant (and the <insert bad habit here> waitress) and their annoyance over <insert name of retail chain here>’s lack of customer service. B-O-R-I-N-G.

For years I thought about blogs as just that, boring accounts of empty lives. I couldn’t see the point of having one, let alone reading them. Until I discovered some niche blogs, wow! Okay, so blogging is great if you just ignore the personal blogs. Or so I thought.

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To be nobody but yourself
in a world which is doing its best, night and day,
to make you like everybody else
means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight,
and never stop fighting.

~ E.E. Cummings

Photo courtesy of geeknerd99

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my productivity habits?

BREAKING NEWS!
Today, a Dutch bloke that goes by hard to pronounce name of Lodewijk, supposedly broke a chain of over 100 days of not running. Today at about 6:07am he tweeted ” off for a morning run“.

So he said it, but did he also do it? Stay with us to find out, after the break.

Blog performance

I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging the past few days. I already wrote about my feelings in Birth of a Blogger, and my decision there is right, but incomplete. Even after deciding to start another blog, I’ve been not so satisfied with myself. I’ve got the feeling that I’m holding myself back by the way I defined this blog. Anyway, I’ll post about it this week. I started to write here, but it was getting too much to fit into a weekly review.

The stats are looking good. Subscribers up again (when will I break through the glass ceiling of 1000 subscribers?). The daily visitors are nice, especially when you know that there is NO stumbleupon traffic there this week. They used to be my biggest source of visitors, but what you see here is search engine traffic and referral traffic from other blogs. Technorati is still on a downward slope. Oh well, it’s great skiing on slopes.

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Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility. - Albert Einstein

Everyday people from all layers of society are using a variety of techniques to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. These techniques can be classified as evasion, avoidance, denial or even obstruction of responsibility. They might seem to accomplish this, but they don’t help you forward in any way. And…c’mon, if you’re doing it, it doesn’t feel all that good, now does it?

In this post we’re going behind the scenes to take a look at the dynamics of why people shy away from responsibility. We’re also taking a look at what reality looks like as a result. And there’s also a sneak preview of what that reality would look like if you change the meaning of reponsibility.

Not all responsibilities are created equal

Everybody is responsible for something. A lot of the responsibilities are acquired, but the responsibility for your own life is definitely yours to take. Yet even though it’s the core responsibility, a lot of people shy away from that one too. To understand why people do this we need to understand the underlying thought processes.

Responsibility is a concept, it’s not tangible and as such we cannot see, hear or touch it. The meaning of these conceptual words (meta model words in NLP) is learned by experience, usually early in life during childhood. At one time a situation happened and you learned the meaning of that word “responsibility”. That very situation is now attached as a subconscious “video”, whenever you hear that word. New situations get added to that meaning as you progress through life, but you mainly build upon that first experience.

Unfortunately that first experience is usually a negative one. Something went wrong and someone was held responsible for it. Or maybe worse…you were held responsible for it. And you learned something: responsibility is no fun!

If you’re lucky, you learned the meaning of responsibility while you were receiving praise. Someone praised you for a good result and told you you were responsible for that wonderful result. It happens, but it’s rare. But it results in a totally different notion of responsibility and a very different attitude towards it.

The dynamics of avoiding responsibility

So it’s not a very pleasant word for most of us. It gets worse though, as we grow older we learn that being responsible for something also means that we are supposed to take control. And when we take control, we will be held accountable by someone else if it’s an acquired responsibility (e.g. your job). And we learn that being held accountable is no fun either. Painful at times even.

Chain of associations

1. Responsibility = being in control
2. Being in control = being held accountable
3. Being held accountable = painful
4. Pain = no good

The resulting chain of association gets stronger, and is reinforced by an instinctive mechanism: Pain avoidance. People are natural pain avoiders, it’s even genetically programmed into our system:

Pain is part of the body’s defense system, triggering a reflex reaction to retract from the painful stimuli, and helps adjust behaviour to increase avoidance of that particular harmful situation in the future.
- excerpt from Pain @ Wikipedia

So it’s not really the responsibility we’re avoiding, but the pain we have associated with it.

Changing the paradigm

Avoiding the pain might work on a short term. Yet at the same time we also know when we should’ve taken responsibility and didn’t, and that resulted in another not-so-nice feeling. And you’re not getting anywhere too.

It’s better to change the paradigm, to lose the association between responsibility and pain. We saw earlier on that it’s possible to have a positive meaning or association with the word responsibility. So we’re going to work on getting more of the positive associations and less of the negative. Easier said than done, right? It’s not really that hard, trust me. We’re just going to stop using the word ‘responsibility’.

The negative assocations we have with that word are too strong to ignore. We can’t just lose them, since we spent so many years training and reinforcing them. And ‘responsibility’ is a nasty word anyway, it’s so passive. It’s derived from ‘to respond’ and you can’t respond unless there’s an outside trigger. We need to find an active synonym.

Taking credit for results is an active formulation. “I take credit!” is something you can say proactively, you don’t have to respond, you can take the initiative. Good? Not yet, better but not good enough. Because ‘credit’ is a nasty word as well, with way too many unpleasant associations. Let’s replace it with ‘merit’, that’s a pleasant and positive word.

So along those lines, we will replace ‘responsible‘ with ‘meritable‘.

Now change your vocabulary!

Feels like playing with words? True, but we’re really going to replace it in our language. Whenever you hear responsible, replace it with meritable when you listen. Whenever you want to say responsibility, say meritability instead. It will feel awkward at first, but you’ll notice the impact instantly.

Suddenly things that you associated with pain, become areas where you can deserve praise for. It’s an opportunity to create, to do something good, to score. It’s fun again! And if you keep it up long enough, you will end up reinforcing positive associations that will even replace the negative associations of ‘responsible’. In time even that word will be safe to use again.

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my productivity habits?

Blog performance

I hope you enjoyed the post about passwords. I had that post in draft for a while before I decided to finally finish it and publish it. I have more posts like that…draft status, needing more time to really finish them. This week I probably won’t be publishing a lot too, because the renovation project (see next section) needs a lot of attention this week also.

Here are the stats: subscribers up, the rest stable.

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