Living Responsibly

Did you ever wonder why some people seem to succeed in every area of life, while so many others just plod along? How do they do it? What is the secret to personal effectiveness?
Adverse conditions spare no one; life hands out its share of distress, yet successful people seem to have mastered the knack of overcoming obstacles. Success is hardly measured in economic terms, but rather in the ability to transcend adversity. As I look back over my years, I pride myself as person who transformed from a youth struggling with self-esteem issues to an adult who walks with his head held proudly. As I grew older, I somehow learned a lesson that has carried me forward on the road towards personal achievement and happiness. What I learned, in a single word, was responsibility.

This doesn't mean that successful people never fail; some of them have a repeated history of defeat. Edison struggled with untold failures until he came up with a workable lightbulb, but his responsibility to himself kept him persistently working until his momentous breakthrough. Being responsible to yourself is the key to mastering every facet of life. Such adjustment is shown to be the key to personal effectiveness in virtually every sphere of life--from working on one's marriage and pursuing a career to developing into an increasingly whole and balanced human being. It is both a psychological and a principle of positive Jewish values.

Responsibility is intimately linked with independence.  An independent person is one who takes responsibility for himself, and can fulfill personal needs without making demands upon others. Codependents, whose happiness is dependent upon the acceptance of others, always walk a tight rope between contentment and despair. In my early adult years, I used to feel dependent on my parents for their approval of my every choice. Disapproval meant hanging my head in shame; not a pleasant way to live. Once I learned to take responsibility for my self, new person emerged.

Self-responsibility is the acid test for maturity. One characteristic of children is that they are almost entirely dependent.  They require grownups for the fulfillment of their needs. As they mature, they increasingly rely on their own efforts. One characteristic of socially evolved adults is that they learn to take responsibility for their own lives--physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. This is the virtue of independence, or self-reliance, an ideal of healthy development and basic to the Jewish tradition of survival.

How do we shirk accountability? We're so conditioned to denying responsibility that we're forced to employ professionals to do the job for us. Rabbis are hired to restore spirituality in a world dominated by materialism. Doctors are supposed to reinstate our health when we choose to live unhealthy lifestyles, and therapists presume to help us cope in a hostile world.

Our ancestral father, Abraham, serves as a good model for self-responsibility when he, under God's command, left the land of his origin to initiate the birth of the Jewish nation. Moses, also, took full responsibility, even under strong protest, to usher a nation of slaves out of Egypt, under the aegis of God's supervision. As a result of living in exile so long, we have learned to stand up for ourselves, to take charge of our lives in hostile host countries, obstinately striving toward greater accomplishments. Responsibility is a Jewish characteristic.

Blame is perhaps the greatest hindrance to self-responsibility.  Grownups are quick to blame their parents for their unhappiness, when indeed it's their own lack of self-responsibility. We blame our bosses, our spouses, our teachers, our elected officials, and even the government as our source of woes. What we don't stop to consider, however, is when we fail to own up to our distraught feelings, we compensate by shifting the buck.

"Independence and self-responsibility are indispensable to psychological well-being. The essence of independence is the practice of thinking for oneself and reflecting critically on the values and beliefs offered by others--of living by one's own mind. The essence of self-responsibility is the practice of making oneself the cause of the effects one wants, as contrasted with a policy of hoping or demanding that someone else 'do something' while one's own contribution is to is to wait and suffer. It is through independence and self-responsibility that we attain personal power", states Nathaniel Branden, a prominent psychologist, in his book "Taking Responsibility"

We are a long way from fully understanding and accepting the practice of self-responsibility as a way of life, and everything it entails, personally and socially. To many people some of what it may be is not only challenging but also distressing. But there are stirrings of awareness. It just may be that self-responsibility is an idea whose time has come.