Taking Responsibility Of Your Actions

I often find myself giving out advice I never seem to take. I don’t want to call myself a hypocrite but I can be sometimes. One thing I am realizing more often is I can be a good person and still hurt people unintentionally.

I do my best to help guide others to happiness or find a way to help them work through their issues. However, I started to notice something no one wants to address. People don’t want to take responsibility over their side of the problem.

I have people constantly ask me for advice, voice their concerns about someone who hurt them and never speak about the role they played in the argument. I will always play the devil’s advocate because there are always three sides to a story: theirs, the other person’s and the truth.

I struggle with this concept myself. I do my best to see all sides of any problem but there are times when I don’t see my own faults, as well. If I am having a disagreement with someone and they address a specific problem they have with me, I sometimes have a hard time agreeing with them. Simply because I don’t think I did anything wrong. Now, when an issue is addressed to me, I try to pay attention and notice if/when I actually do what I am being told about. Not to my surprise, I am not perfect. I know, hard to believe but here we are.

Something I also struggle with is allowing people to change. I will ask for someone to change a behavior toward me and when they start to try, I tend to not let them. Just as you must learn to change, you must also allow someone else to. Change is not easy and takes time to put into action but as long as someone is trying to correct their mistakes, we have to be willing to meet them halfway. In order for change to happen, we must be willing to acknowledge our own faults and be willing to change them. We constantly point the finger at everyone else but have a hard time, when it comes to correcting our own mistakes.

I’ve learned rather quickly we cannot change other people. We can only change ourselves and the way we respond to the situations and people around us. We have to be willing to recognize our faults and say, “Hey, I messed up but I’m acknowledging it. These are the steps I am going to take, in order to correct it.”   

Nobody is perfect and we will sometimes hurt the people we care most about, unintentionally. However, there are ways to work on fixing your mistakes by taking responsibility and then taking steps, to correct them. One of our biggest faults, is acting as if the world is simply against us, because we consider ourselves to be a good person. We have the mindset of, “I am a good person, I help others, yet I get treated so badly in life.” Even good people make mistakes and being able to recognize that and then fixing it is important. We could all afford to be a little better.