By Tim Mulcahy

The following article is an excerpt from Total Health & Weight Loss, The Truestar Way.

Responsibility is your ability to respond directly and honestly to any given circumstance. Often responsibility is mistaken for blame, guilt or shame when actually accepting responsibility shows discipline and maturity. Accepting responsibility allows you to be in control of every situation. You know that the outcome of the situation is based on your response to it.

Responsibility is an attitude that is not very well understood, however. Visionaries, such as Stephen Covey and Victor Frankl, counsel that only when you truly take responsibility for all your actions, can you start to gain control of your life. Recently, when I was listening to a Brian Tracy audio in my car, I first heard someone say that responsibility was more important than goal-setting for being successful. “If you don’t take responsibility for everything that happens to you when taking action to achieve your goals,” Brian Tracy says, “how can you be certain of achieving them?”

Responsible for Ourselves and for Others
”God helps those who help themselves,” the bible says. For religious or spiritual persons who believe in a higher power (as do I), this statement is all about responsibility. If you truly want to help others, you have to take responsibility for your actions and help yourself first. A leading cancer clinic found that cancer patients who take responsibility for their disease have a far greater response to treatment than those who do not accept responsibility.

Taking responsibility for your actions, reactions and results in life is the key for opening the door to life improvement.

Responsibility Self-Talk
This daily self-talk statement will help to condition attitude by developing the important skill of accepting responsibility for your actions, reactions and results.

I accept total responsibility for my actions, reactions and outcomes today and every day for the rest of my life. I understand that by accepting responsibility for my success and failures on a day-to-day basis, I take control of my life and am able to accept merit in regard to my success. Also, by accepting responsibility for my failures, I am able to learn and change as I realize that failure is an event, not a person. By accepting responsibility, I can change my actions, reactions and outcomes in the future. I also realize that failure to accept responsibility leaves me powerless and without control to take life into my own hands.