“But there is a corollary to freedom and that's personal responsibility, and the real challenge is how you generate that personal responsibility without imposing it.” —Esther Dyson
Step 9 to creating a life that you love is about understanding how new learning can be integrated throughout your personal change process and how you can apply it to all areas of your life. Most likely you will need to make adjustments, and these will be based on constant self-reflection. Fine tuning your change process by taking personal responsibility for your life is a big part of this step. You continue to deepen your self-reflection and self-awareness in order to stay motivated and connected to your vision. This process ensures that you continue to feel good about the person you are growing into on a daily basis. You will also give yourself space to celebrate all of the shifts and changes you have created up to this point in the process.
As humans we are driven by and respond to rewards. Rewarding, celebrating and staying focused on what is going well throughout your change process helps to create this subtle shift in growing in the direction of who you want to be and how you want to live. As you celebrate and apply your new learning it is helpful to share those insights and skills with others. When you share with others you solidify and strengthen what you have learned. This sharing process makes it more real, more solid and more grounded within you.
Taking personal responsibility for your life is closing the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it. As you have formed new habits, focused on what’s going well and accessed your support team as needed, living within the ability to make choices based on your vision is essential. This demonstrates the ability to take personal responsibility for your life. This is where many people get stuck. They struggle to keep going, to stick with the practices that work once they feel good and complacency can start to creep in… complacency can destroy your vision.
When you take personal responsibility for your life, you essentially ask yourself before each choice, decision and undertaking you make, “does this choice support my vision?” If the answer is no, then is it worth it? Ultimately, you have to decide this, often multiple times a day. This is where reviewing and staying true to the process of change is essential. The thing is, you don’t just go through the steps once and create a life you love. You have to review, redo and keep moving forward by taking personal responsibility for your life every single day. When things go awry it’s easy to look outside yourself for where to place the blame. This is not taking personal responsibility. When you can look within and reflect on your own blind spots, your shadow and patterns, you have the ability to continue to fine-tune them.
While self-awareness is the heart of step 1, it’s necessary throughout each and every step to build on your self-awareness through constant self-reflection. This is how you can make the necessary adjustments. One way to do this is through integrating rewards and celebrating what is going well. Step 9 is really about constantly reintegrating all of the previous steps so that you don’t find yourself in a state of complacency, that where you’ve made it to is good enough even though your vision is much greater. In step 9 you remind yourself not to settle, to keep moving towards what you want and remaining aligned with why you want it.
When you engage in regular self-reflection, make the necessary adjustments and celebrate your wins, you will find yourself closer to living in alignment with your vision. When you take personal responsibility for your life, stay in alignment with your greater vision and reward yourself for your shifts no matter how small, you will find yourself creating a life that you love.