“Living the dream” means feeling how you want to feel, doing what you want to do, creating what you want to create, and being who you want to be. To do that, you need a foundation that’s built on one thing and one thing only.
Ready for it?
It’s Radical Personal Responsibility. Every one of these three words is significant:
RADICAL: far-reaching, thorough, complete, total, comprehensive, exhaustive, sweeping, wide-ranging, extensive, all-encompassing.
PERSONAL: It means total ownership. The agreement that anything that comes into your world, your life, or your day is there or not there due to something in you. Owning that you can make a choice over your actions, opinions, meanings, interpretations, thoughts, beliefs, responses, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors.
RESPONSIBILITY: Look at the word. Response-ability. Able to respond. Response is a choice; it’s conscious. It’s what happens when you’re living in your power. Without it, you’re reacting. Reaction is what happens when we are living from the past. Living from our default. When we are not choosing. When we are not conscious.
It’s super normal to be in shock about this, to feel scared, a little annoyed, and very curious about what Radical Personal Responsibility can really do in your life.
Once you have let the shock wear off, you will awaken to the greatest sense of freedom you have ever experienced. The freedom of knowing you are the problem and the solution, the obstacle and the answer, the pain and the relief.
You’ll also experience one of the biggest benefits of Radical Personal Responsibility: what happens with stress, conflict, and resistance, which we all experience regularly in our lives. They are all part of the human experience. You may have believed that there’s very little you can personally do to impact or shift their power, but in this article, we’ll see how Radical Personal Responsibility offers the hope of change.
Let Go of the Stress You’ve Created
Stress. STRESS. The silent killer. Stress is the response that keeps your heart rate up, that keeps you overwhelmed, that constantly releases cortisol throughout your body, that congests your mind and soul, and that breeds physical disease.
Your mind is connected to your body, so when you’re thinking stressful or negative thoughts, those are the thoughts that trigger your stress response and keep you living in chronic stress. Your system is constantly releasing cortisol as a result of these thoughts because your brain doesn’t know what’s real and what is only in your mind. A threat is a threat as far as your mind is concerned, whether it’s self-induced or not.
The continuous stressful thoughts mean that your body never gets to rest. This, in turn, creates an inner environment that easily breeds disease and lowers your immunity; it affects your blood flow and causes illness. And it makes you easily triggered.
Of course, not all stress is bad, and there are moments of benefit, specifically with short-term bursts of acute stress. Like when you hear about a mother finding the strength to lift a car to save her child. Short-term stress can aid in focus and mental acuity, and it also assists in physical performance.
The problem is that so many of us are living with chronic stress, stress experienced over such a prolonged period of time, that you may not even recognize what it feels like to not be under stress because you’ve been living with it for so long.
Have you ever slept on a brand-new mattress after ten years of sleeping on the same old one? You wake up the morning after your first sleep on the new mattress, and you are stunned to realize how poorly you’d been sleeping for so long.
Exactly. It’s time to get off your shitty stress mattress. It’s time to take responsibility for your stress levels and treat your mind, body, and soul with respect. Stress isn’t happening to you. You are responsible for your stress.
Choose to See Conflict Differently
Not all conflict is bad. We have an association with conflict that leads us to think it means anger, negativity, or that we won’t get along with others.
In reality, conflict just means that two or more people have different opinions.
We make the notion of disagreement quite terrifying, but it’s not at all. We don’t all come out of the same movie theater and have the same opinion about what we’ve just seen.
What’s stopping us from having a soul-driven conversation rather than an ego-driven conversation, from listening to someone else’s opinion, without judgment, and being relaxed about the fact that sometimes the only resolution is to agree to disagree?
If we perceive conflict to be negative, we descend into a bad place quickly when we find ourselves in the middle of a disagreement. This can be hell on our relationships.
When you live your life based in Radical Personal Responsibility, you are able to choose to see conflict as constructive. You are able to own your shit and create a connected experience through listening, not trying to be right, and allowing both the other person and yourself to be heard. To really take responsibility for the conflict you are experiencing creates an entirely new level of communication and connection.
Put Yourself in the Seat of Choice
Resistance is the refusal to accept something or an attempt to prevent something. When you don’t want a certain outcome, you can become resistant to it, or push against it, if you will. This creates the opposite of Radical Personal Responsibility.
The more resistance you have toward something, the more the thing that you resist will persist. If you resist feeling your fears, they will become louder and bigger. If you resist your emotions and shove them down, they will grow bigger and become a more prominent issue. If you resist not taking 100 percent ownership, the problems you are experiencing will get more challenging and more pervasive.
Inherently, in not taking ownership, you are resisting. Not taking Radical Personal Responsibility actually perpetuates stress, conflict, and resistance in your life.
As soon as you take complete ownership, you can choose differently. You diffuse it. Through your personal power, you lose the resistance and place yourself in the seat of choice. When I say bring it to you and claim it, I actually mean literally bring it to you.
Reach Out and Grab What’s Draining You
Visualize the feeling of stress, conflict, or resistance that you’re dealing with. See it sitting across the table from you. Now, put your hands out and bring it toward you. Sit it right down on your lap. It’s not nearly as scary now that it’s sitting with you, is it?
Talk to it. Say to it, “I see you, I feel you, and I love you.” How do you feel about it now? Through this simple exercise, you can take your power back. It’s simple, yet profound!
Radical Personal Responsibility enables you to claim your power. You can live in a daily state of empowerment and leave stress, conflict, and resistance behind.
When you choose Radical Personal Responsibility, you say yes to a life of freedom, you say yes to a life based purely on your power of choice. You say yes to yourself.
Repeat the Worthy Human Mantra after me:
I am worthy. I am enough. I am powerful. I get to choose.
For more advice on combating stress, conflict, and resistance with Radical Personal Responsibility, visit http://www.thelittfactor.com/.