MODULE 3: Mindset Mastery
When we Blame, we Disempower Ourselves
Many people spend their lives feeling like complete victims, or at the mercy of others in their lives.
Maybe you are giving your emotional life over to your partner. You believe he is responsible for making you feel happy and loved. You believe he is responsible for meeting your needs. When you are in that space, you will constantly be trying to control him, or get him to do things that will “make you feel loved”. You will be mad and disappointed when he doesn’t do what you want. You will make his actions determine how you feel. This is a very disempowered place to be. The reality is you cannot control other people. And you have probably noticed that they don’t like it when you try.
Unfortunately, this is really reinforced in our culture and in traditional relationship counselling and self-help. Think about this. If you go to your partner and you say, “These are my needs. You must meet them. Do these certain things so that I feel a certain way”, it is as if you are now completely dependent on your partner. If he in turn does this to you, it’s a recipe for resentment. Even if you want to meet your partner’s needs, most of the time you won’t be very good at it. It is a big weight to carry. Most of us are busy enough trying to manage our own emotional life. Delegating the responsibility for your own wellbeing to someone else can be detrimental to any relationship.
Emotional Adulthood – Taking the Wheel
The only way to achieve power in your life is through taking responsibility for yourself. It is the most powerful place to live from. It takes effort and awareness for us to make this shift. It can be challenging, and even difficult at times. It will require you to undo some of your previous programming and belief systems. You will need to decide to take back ownership of your life no matter what is going on outside of you.
Taking Ownership is Amazing.
When we decide to accept full responsibility no matter what other people do or what happens in the world, we end up so empowered. We get to be the people that we really want to be. Trust me on this. You will realize how much power and control you have over your own life, no matter what.
Emotional Adulthood means taking full responsibility for how we are feeling no matter what someone else says or does. We take ownership of our pain and our happiness. We stop expecting other people to act in certain ways so that we can feel happy. We take back control of our own thinking, and we don’t blame other people. We understand that, ultimately, we are always in control of how we think, feel, and act, and most importantly - the decisions we make in our own lives. This doesn’t mean that we accept bad behavior or lower our standards. But it does mean that we DECIDE from a place of deep self knowing, what we will choose to think, feel, and do in any given situation.
What Emotional Adulthood Looks Like
Living from emotional adulthood means making a very big shift for most people. It means thinking “I am responsible for my happiness and my unhappiness”. It means believing “I am responsible for my thoughts, feelings and actions, always”. It means “I always get to decide how to respond in any given decision”.
When something happens, we DECIDE what to think. We DECIDE what to feel. We take ACTION that produces results we really want. We act INTENTIONALLY and not reactively.
The Effect on Relationships
When we take responsibility for ourselves, we become who we want to be. When we do make mistakes or act in a way that we later regret, we own our actions. We apologize. We accept responsibility. We don’t blame others anymore. We don’t say things like “The reason I said that thing is because you were mean to me”, or “The reason I lied is because I knew you would get angry”.
Emotional adulthood requires ownership and vulnerability. Start to say things like “I want to let you know that I am sorry about how I acted. I yelled at you because I was not managing my own mind”, or “The reason why I lied is because I was not taking responsibility and I felt ashamed”.
We treat others better when we are emotional adults. Even though you know that you are not responsible for how other people feel, you are still responsible for how you behave and show up in the world and your relationships. This part is entirely up to you. Decide who you want to be and then live into it, regardless of what other people say or do. A great question to always be asking yourself is “Who do I want to be in this situation?”
Become Aware of Where You are Living in Blame
Explore this in your life. Always keep an attitude of curiosity and nonjudgement. Write down some examples of where you are giving away your personal power. Where are you not taking ownership for your own life or behavior? Where are you placing blame in your life? Where are you not taking responsibility?
A Perspective Shift to Feel Empowered: Choosing Your Life
Choosing Your Current Life is Powerful
This simple shift in perspective can be a game changer.
Remember that as an adult, you do not have to do anything you don't want to do.
Really.
Very often we think that we have to go to work, take care of our children, attend social events, or pay the bills. The absolute truth is that you do not have to do any of these things. Everything we do in life is always a choice (either conscious or subconscious) and is the result of weighing the risks and benefits of our decisions. Sometimes we choose something because we like what it provides (for example, we pay the bills because we get to keep our hydro on).
It is really important to recognize what is within your control, and there are always three things: Your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions. Many aspects of your life will be determined by other people. For example, your schedule, your work responsibilities and duties, what another person says or does. Using the model, we can classify these as circumstances. You may not be able to control all of it, but what you think and feel - and ultimately, how you respond - is always up to you.
You will not always love every circumstance or aspect of your life.
That is normal and healthy. The goal is never to feel good all of the time. You may make choices and decisions in which you love and desire some parts of the outcome but not all of them. For example, you might choose to work in specific job because you love the specialty area and your colleagues. But you might not like the hours. You might wish you had more time allotted for each client.
In these situations, it is important to remind yourself WHY you are choosing what you are.
When you remind yourself that you do always have options, you are able to step into a more empowering position in your own life. It is important to take full responsibility and ownership over the choices that you are making. Realize that you have the option to think about your life any way that you want to. You do not have to let external circumstances control your emotional wellbeing. Showing up as the "owner" of your own life will allow you to feel less like a victim to your circumstances and more empowered.
Worksheet: Taking Responsibility for Your Feelings
The pathway to reclaiming control in your life involves understanding that you are always in charge when it comes to your thoughts, feelings, and actions. You are also always in charge of the decisions you make. Use this worksheet to uncover where may be falling into the emotional childhood trap.
Reclaiming Responsibility for Your Life
This module will introduce you to a foundational concept that will be one of the most transformative for you. We are going to discuss the importance of emotional maturity and how to achieve it. This may the first time you have ever heard this information presented this way, and in fact it is contrary to a lot of what we have been conditioned to think of in terms of emotional health. I promise you that although this concept may be new to you, when you understand and shift into this mindset, it will be the single most empowering move you make in your own emotional growth.
Emotional Childhood – Living in Blame
Most of us reach adulthood still functioning as emotional children a lot (or all!) of the time. We blame other people for how we feel, for how we act, and for the results in our lives. We react to, or avoid our emotions rather than taking full responsibility.
It is not that we are doing something wrong or choosing this approach purposely. We are so deeply conditioned in this way of thinking that we perpetuate the cycle by teaching each other that other people are responsible for how we feel. Think about it. How many times do we say to our children, “Did she hurt your feelings?”, or “When you said that to your sister you made her sad”.
As children, we don’t yet understand emotions and most of us are not taught what to do with them. We believe that whatever is happening in our lives is the cause of our emotions, rather than being aware of the thoughts that are taking place in our own mind. We aren’t taught that when something happens, we have a thought about it, and that thought creates a feeling. We have no idea that we control our emotional response and most importantly - our actions.
The problem with this way of thinking is that it is completely disempowering and locks us into a space of blame. We blame the our bosses, our parents, the weather, our childhood, the guy who cut us off in traffic. We make how we feel and act dependent on external factors. We take all our emotional power, and we give it away to something or someone else.