[Neurons] 2015 "Neurons" Meta Reflections #38

Sun Aug 30 18:11:24 EDT 2015

From: L. Michael Hall

Meta Reflections #38

August 24, 2015

Creating Response-Able Persons #3

RESPONSE-ABLE

Empower for Action or as a Victim?

Ultimately responsibility is about your actions (responses) and about your
ability to take action.  In a word, it is about what you are able to do now
which can make a difference in your life as you meet your basic human needs.
Did you get all of that?  There's a lot packed into that sentence so don't
read it too quickly.  Especially don't race through it.  If you do, you will
miss a lot which is packed into it.  Let's unpack it.

 Able: This speaks about the capability and the capacity for action which
comes from the awareness and ownership of your innate powers (Meta
Reflections #31).  Ability is first of all the innate potential and ability
depends on both knowledge and skill practice to become actual.  For ability
to develop you have to learn and incorporate what you have learned so you
can execute what you know.  What do you know and what are you able to do to
unleash your potentials?

 Do: This refers to taking action.  The responsible behavior is something
that you do, it is not about your opinions, beliefs, excuses, emotions, or
what you feel, but actions.  It is about, What are you going to do?

 Now: This speaks about the time element which is today and into tomorrow.
It is not the past.  The past, at best, only refers to the conditions in
which you learned something.  It is not the problem.  The problem is always
one's frames. The question is, "What will you do today that will make a
difference for your future?  The responsible person does not keep recounting
his history of abuse and misfortune.

 You: This refers to the person who has the most influence to improve
things.  It is you, not others.  So, What are you going to do?

 Basic needs: This refers to what's required for any human being and arises
from the innate "needs" (life requirements) for being biologically healthy
(survival needs), psychologically healthy (safety needs and self needs), and
relationally healthy (social needs of love and affection) and one's meanings
needs (self-actualization needs).

Let's now summarize: What is responsibility and what is it about?

Responsibility is about what you are able to do now which can make a
difference in your life as you meet your basic human needs.

If you take your powers-of-response (thinking, emoting, speaking, behaving)
and integrate them by meta-stating ownership and embodiment, then you create
responsibility.  Then, regardless of the circumstances that life has thrown
at you-responsibility is responding with the powers you have at your
disposal and taking a responsible course of action to make things better for
you and others.

To lead a responsible life and to take a responsible course of action, you
need to be prepared with your basic powers (Meta-Reflection #35) for taking
action.  Doing that will make you responsive.  Conversely, if you want to be
ill-prepared for the world, or to send your child into the world
ill-prepared- go out without thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting as if
you are the one responsible for yourself.  Instead blame.  Blame others,
blame your parents, blame your partner, blame the government, blame your
school, blame history.  In other words, yuou can be an empowered victim if
you so choose!

But William Glasser calls this blaming "nowhere talk."  To do that, talk
about your mother, father, brother and all of the people who hurt you.
These may be easy to talk about, and blame, because they excuse your
failures.  There is however a price to pay.  That's because in the end- they
lead nowhere (Reality Therapy, p. 38).  That's because it leads to both lack
of responsible behavior and irresponsible behaviors.  The irresponsible
behaviors may be feeling sorry for oneself (emotional behavior), blaming the
world (linguistic behavior), wallowing in misery and inadequacy
(interpersonal behavior).  For this reason, in Reality Therapy (1965),
therapists accept no excuses for irresponsible acts:

"We accept no excuses for irresponsible acts.  Students are held responsible
for their behavior and cannot escape responsibility on the pea of being
emotionally upset, mistreated by mother, neglected by father, or
discriminated against by society." (p. 70).  

Nowhere talk focuses on the past.  By then focusing on the past some people
over-emphasize their inadequacy.  That undermines their response-ability and
weakens their will.  Others  think that if they can gain insight into the
"cause" of whatever problem or mistake or bad thing that happen, that will
solve the problem.  But that's an illusion.  Whatever you learn about the
past will not "solve" it.  That's because you still have to live with
whatever happened, deal with it, and move on.  Plus, learning what went
wrong seldom tells you what to do right.  So the sooner you learn to cope
better, understand what to do today, the better.

Paradoxically, to be un-responsible or irresponsible requires using your
"responses" to avoid effective responsibility(!).  When a person is
irresponsible, he is using his intellect to invent ideas, excuses,
explanations that justify him.  A pretty powerful response!  The paradox is
that every victim, every person playing helpless, weak, unable to do
things-is actually a powerful person.  What's typically not recognized are
the responses which the victim makes which are in his control.  He
victimizes himself by focusing on some inadequacy in self or frustration
with the world and frames it as beyond his power to do anything and then
argues for that perspective.  In other words, he is using his mental and
emotional and linguistic powers to be a victim.  She clings to the secondary
benefits of being a victim- others jump in to help, others give pity and
compassion, she gets attention, maybe government assistance, etc.

In spite of how powerful irresponsibility is, it has a nowhere direction.
It takes you nowhere useful.  There are lots of secondary gains which people
get from irresponsibility- self-justification, an excuse from effort, blame
of others circumstances.  Yet all of that is the loser's way, not the way to
win in life.  Response-able responsibility is a very powerful meta-state.
Try it on.  It will do you good.

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

               Neuro-Semantics Executive Director 

               Neuro-Semantics International

P.O. Box 8

Clifton, CO. 81520 USA                             

               1 970-523-7877 

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