If I hold a ball in the air and let it go, what happens? It falls. Why does it fall?
Gravity, right? Everybody knows that. But what if there was an alternative reason? What might that be? Because I let it go.
So the problem is that most of the time in most of our life experiences, there are two causes, but we typically only allow one space for the explanation.
We try to use truth as the filter, but that’s not enough because, like in this instance, both are true. So then we typically try to decide which truth we put first.
The elements in most of these decisions are broken down into two parts: what is inside our control and what is outside our control. In the case of the ball, it’s possible to choose either one; however, one of the choices gives you power, and the other one makes you powerless. If you choose gravity, which is the one where you’re powerless, you are doomed to an outcome that you have no control over because you can’t stop gravity, and the ball will fall.
Using that logic, it would seem foolish as to why anyone would ever choose an explanation that disempowers them. However, that’s the way we typically run our lives.
Have you ever been late for a meeting and, as an explanation, you say, “I got stuck in my last meeting,” or “I got stuck in traffic”? That’s pretending that there is nothing we can do about it to shrug off our responsibility for the choice we made. We weren’t really stuck in the last meeting; we chose to stay there and not come to this one on time. We weren’t really late because of the traffic; we chose not to leave early enough to take the traffic into account.
Fred Koffman said that we do it because we want to remain innocent? That innocence is the philosophy of a victim. Victimhood is when a person privileges explanations with external factors. Whenever something goes wrong, they choose an explanation that will focus on factors that are out of their control.
If we choose innocence and give away the power, we end up with impotence, giving away any chance of changing the outcome.
It’s as ridiculous as getting stuck on an escalator and feeling like there’s nothing you can do until someone comes to help. Observing people stuck in victimhood is as ridiculous as being stuck on an escalator.
The price of power, on the other hand, is responsibility. Not responsibility in the normal way where you’re not responsible for what happens, but responsible for what you do with it. Like someone stuck on an escalator, it’s about their sense of ability to respond to the situation. They are not stuck because of the escalator but because they could choose to just walk up the stopped escalator, like stairs.
We learned this when we were kids – I didn’t break the toy. It just broke. I didn’t spill the milk; it just spilt. It wasn’t me; it was the universe, and there was nothing I could do about it. That way, I can’t be held responsible for what happened and have the related consequences.
Then we grow up, and we follow the same pattern. The project went overtime, the file got lost, a mistake was made… don’t fire me; there was nothing I could do about it; it just happened. We still, when it’s too much of a stretch to blame the universe, just blame someone else.
These are the choices that ruin our lives and our careers. We also help others to ruin their lives and careers because we never ask those questions. Like drug dealers helping them to feel better but really doing a lot of damage. We never ask what role they had in the problem or what they could do differently to change the outcome. We support them to pretend that there was nothing they could do about it. The best thing we can do is choose not to participate in their victimhood.
So the real question is whether or not to be response-able. If we stay at the effect of the things going on around us with no control, we’re not response-able.
In other words, if we don’t feel part of the problem, we can’t be part of the solution.
Participating in responsibility makes us response-able.