Anoop Verma
Blaming others for the problems that we might be facing in any point of our life comes easily to us. But the danger is that playing the idea of blaming external factors, might become an integral part of your personality and once that happens, you will lose the power of taking responsibility for managing your own life. It is easy to come across people who avoid taking responsibility by not only blaming others, but also blaming the weather, the system, their background, their origin, and so on. The inventiveness in the area of blames is truly limitless.
During the course of their lives, some people become the masters of evasion. So much so that they maintain their innocence in face of every problem that crops up. There can be different reasons for this kind of attitude. Some people do it because they don’t have the inner strength to take responsibility for anything that goes wrong. For others it is a kind of manipulative strategy to get ahead in office and appear innocent. Whatever, the reason may be, in the long run, this kind of strategy must backfire. When others notice that a person is shirking responsibility for a problem that he had a hand in creating, they loose respect for him. And in most cases, he has to own up in the end, and this only aggravates his difficulties.
Blaming others for the situation that you are facing in your life only serves the purpose of ensuring that you remain in the same situation for even longer period of time. It will negatively impact your finances, your career, your relationships and the overall quality of your life. At times some people use money as a tool to carry out vengeance. The easiest way to make people pay for their wrongs is to make them support you financially. This denies them their financial freedom and because you believe they “owe” you (whoever they are, be it the government or your parents) you feel vindicated. But this kind of strategy also ensures that you never get to have financial freedom.
If you have disagreements with someone in your family, your office or elsewhere, you should try to address the problem by meaningful interpersonal communication. The use of silent treatment, personal attacks, or force will only result in further alienation and the problem will get aggravated. Those playing the blame game are mostly unable to use the constructive methods of resolving disagreements. Often they resort to the negativistic goal of making sure that people get what they deserve. Instead of helping you grow and prosper, the blame game strategy leads to creation of even more conflicts in which you get mired.
We need to ask ourselves what kind of outcomes we might be able to achieve if we were to take responsibility more often? If you knew that you were solely responsible for every delay, every failure that comes in the way of any project that you wish to execute, then you might plan your work more carefully and it becomes more likely for you to achieve some kind of success. Just taking responsibility changes everything. It makes us in charge of our own life. It enables you to come out of the feeling that your life is in the tyrannical grip of unchangeable fate and destiny.
If you think carefully, you will realise that the quality of our lives is not that closely linked to the random events that come our way. What really matters is how we respond to the events. By confining yourself to merely blaming the random events for the course that your life has taken, you are taking the power of responsibility away from you. If every bad thing that has happened to you is someone else’s fault, then you will not be able to make an attempt to change the course of your life. The better option is to start taking responsibility. Take firm control of the steering wheel of your life and start driving to the destination that you wish to reach.
The words of Anne Frank come to the mind, “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” You really don’t need to wait for even a moment before taking responsibility doing all that you can for improving your world. Stop blaming – your parents, your upbringing, your boss, your luck. Tell yourself that the course of your life will be influenced not by what happens to you, but by what you do about it.
Get rid of the feeling that someone always has to be blamed and made to pay. Everyday life is not a court of law and you are not the judge and jury. Accept yourself and others unconditionally. This doesn’t mean you can’t negatively rate your own actions or those of others; but it does mean that you shouldn’t berate yourself or others. People around you might do stupid and irrational acts, but you don’t have to spend your entire life blaming them. You can move on and try to build your own life through your own hard work, enterprise and motivation.
