Day 11 and Taking Responsibility

I feel like I say this every single day (I suppose it's a good thing) but today and especially tomorrow are two of my favorite days in Tools.

If yesterday was about shifting perspective, today is about the ultimate perspective: one where you have complete responsibility for all the outcomes in your life.

There just isn't much of anything you can accomplish while you're still making excuses for yourself.  When you trick yourself into believing you're blocked until an outside circumstance is resolved, you open yourself up to being stuck in a life you don't want for a very long time.

Why do that to yourself?  One of the crappiest yet best thing I've done was accepting responsibility for an area of my life that I've always struggled with (procrastination).  When I look at what I've created and what my life looks like, I realize that everything would change - my thoughts and my surroundings - if I took care of this problem.  This is either the most depressing fact in the world, because literally I have let myself fall so far below my potential.  Or it's the greatest thing in the world because it means each new day is another opportunity to create a life so great I can barely even imagine it. After spending a good deal of time in each perspective, I think I'm opting for the latter. :)

So, yesterday was a particularly good day for me.  I made virtually no excuses.  When today's exercise asked that I list some excuses I made in the last 24 hours I drew a complete blank.  I enlisted my girlfriend to help me and after an excited "Oh, what about ..." she fell silent not knowing how to finish the sentence.  I don't think silence has ever been a better compliment!

Another interesting thing happened yesterday too.  I've really been trying to get in the habit of using as much positive self talk as possible.  It's already made such a huge difference.  During one of my affirmative out loud discussions yesterday, I began to feel a bit like I was bragging out loud.  Indeed, my gf even pointed out some counterpoints to the good things I was saying.  I caught her and myself.  Isn't that strange?  It'd be inappropriate to speak well of yourself if your true intent is to gain self esteem by knowingly making others around you feel worse about themselves.  However, why shouldn't we celebrate all of our achievements as well as the achievements of those around us?  If your intent is only to recognize yourself for the wonderful person you really are, isn't it absolutely crazy that most of us have the first inclination to squash that?

Before bed tonight, we took turns going on for about 3 minutes straight each about all the thing we do well and are really good at.  We took turns speaking about ourselves, as well as the other person.  I have to say, I like this approach much better :)

 Hope everyone has a great day.  Thank you so much to anyone who took out the time to comment in the last few days.  It makes me sincerely happy to know that I helped while you created a positive insight for yourself!

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