Quotes about Responsibility

At the very heart of our Circle of Influence is our ability to make and keep commitments and promises. The commitments we make to ourselves and to others, and our integrity to those commitments, are the essence and clearest manifestation of our proactivity.

He can only answer to life by answering for his own life.

I know this idea is a dramatic paradigm shift for many people. It is so much easier to blame other people, conditioning, or conditions for our own stagnant situation. But we are responsible—"response-able"—to control our lives and to powerfully influence our circumstances by working on be, on what we are.

Principle-centered leadership is practiced from the inside out on four levels: 1) personal (my relationship with myself); 2) interpersonal (my relationships and interactions with others); 3) managerial (my responsibility to get a job done with others); and 4) organizational (my need to organize people—to recruit them, train them, compensate them, build teams, solve problems, and create aligned structure, strategy, and systems).

But as proactive people, we can carry our own physical or social weather with us.

Though they may have to prioritize the use of their influence, proactive people have a Circle of Concern that is at least as big as their Circle of Influence, accepting the responsibility to use their influence effectively.

Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us. OBJECTIVE INTROSPECTION Until we see ourselves from the outside objectively, we will automatically project our motives onto other people.

In the words of William George Jordan, "Into the hands of every individual is given a marvelous power for good or evil—the silent, unconscious, unseen influence of his life. This is simply the constant radiation of what man really is, not what he pretends to be."

By making and keeping promises to ourselves and others, little by little, our honor becomes greater than our moods. The

First, take responsibility for your life; and second, take initiative. It's that simple. Be an agent, not a victim. Don't wait for life to happen to you; happen to it. Be the driver of your life, not just a passenger. Live out of your imagination, not your past.

As we make and keep commitments, even small commitments, we begin to establish an inner integrity that gives us the awareness of self-control and the courage and strength to accept more of the responsibility for our own lives.

I admit this is very hard to accept emotionally, especially if we have had years and years of explaining our misery in the name of circumstance or someone else's behavior. But until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday," that person cannot say, "I choose otherwise.