How Responsibility Is Holding You Back

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.