Accountability & Setbacks - What You Believe is What You'll Get
Posted by Jim Bearden on Mon, Sep 28, 2009 @ 10:57 AM
The outside factors in our lives, the people, situations and circumstances that we encounter do have impacts on us and—in some instances—on our efforts to achieve success. The economic/financial uncertainties we’re currently facing provide examples of circumstances that impact us negatively; we’ll call them setbacks.
Here’s something I want you to think about as we move forward in this series on Accountability:
The choices we make about the setbacks we encounter,
will ultimately prove more powerful (have more impact on us)
than the setbacks themselves.
Some of the most powerful choices we make about those setbacks are the meanings we assign and the power we delude ourselves into thinking that they have over us. The meanings we assign are based on the perspective we use, and the two most common perspectives used to process setbacks are Victimhood and Accountability. Of the two, the former seems to be the one being used more often.
Victimhood begins with an underlying belief about the relationship between outside factors and our emotional states. Here’s the underlying belief that supports Victimhood: My feelings are the emotional consequences of what happens out there.
Most of us seem to believe that our emotional states are caused by the people, situations and circumstances we encounter; that emotionally, we are at the mercy of those outside factors. Having trouble accepting that as something you believe? OK, here’s a question: Are there people in your life who upset you?
If you answered no—and if that is the truth—congratulations. If you answered yes (as almost all of us would), then you’ve just acknowledged a variation on that Victim belief. You are convinced (believe) that those other people can—and do—create your feelings.
So how does that belief relate to the current economic/financial circumstances? All of us probably experienced some form of fear as the situation unfolded, but the people operating with the belief that their fear is caused by that situation have continued to “feed” that fear, all the while blaming it on the economy. They’re caught in an “endless thought/emotion loop”, and they are the folks most inclined to “hunker and hope”.