We all believe that we’re taking responsibility for our lives. That’s a good thing because taking responsibility is critical to attaining our goals. We all want to attain our goals, right?
Key to reaching our goals is our appreciation of cause and effect. You see, in each and every life situation there is a cause, and there is an effect.
Personal and professional power comes from accepting the role as the Cause for all experiences in our life. If we choose to be an effect, we become a victim to the world around us – the ex-spouse who cheated, the unfair boss, the economy, the government and other external influences become the cause in our lives. And we become more and more powerless.
Obviously not a good choice. Yet we make it, now don’t we? I surely did.
Until recently I would have gone to my grave believing that I was taking responsibility for my life. Then I learned I was fooling myself. When I understood the reality of Cause or Effect and then listened to my internal dialogue, I found myself sitting in the effect side of the equation in more areas that I would have ever guessed.
How We End Up In Effect
I can thank hours of traditional approaches to problem solving for that powerlessness. I’ve spent so much time focused on the problems, aka the effects, in my life; discussing, analyzing and picking them apart in every possible aspect. All that focus on the problems imprints those very problems even more deeply in our unconscious minds. Who knew?
Being Your Own Cause
We humans like to spend time on the effect side of the equation. It’s a natural (and not so inspired) part of our human programming. We focus on the problem, over and over again. All we do is give the problems more power as we focus on what’s bad, wrong, ineffective, broken and limiting. As we think and focus, so we become.
To find my own place as the Cause in my life, I started keeping a little notebook full of the statements I heard in my mind – about me, my life and all of its events. Every time I caught myself in the effect side of life – I wrote down the thought. Then, I stopped and pivoted the thought to take the Cause position, to be my own responsible party.
Try it for Yourself
One of the principles of Neural Linguistic Programming is that we all have the resources we need to do whatever we want to do. Another is that we are the Cause of our lives. We control our thoughts, and therefore we control our results…aka the effects.
A few weeks ago I shifted to take responsibility for every effect (result) in my life. I am the Cause – no matter what happens. There are No excuses. The buck stops here.
This single shift in perspective created powerful impacts in my life. More and more personal power is flowing because I claimed my position as the Cause of all of my life’s experiences, good and not so much.
Stepping up to be the Cause in your life will give you more personal power. Try it for a week or two and then let me know what you think, feel, see….won’t you?
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I learned a number of performance enhancing practices that leverage Cause and Effect while I was training with the magical Tad James team last week. If you’d like to know more about how you can harness your Ultimate Power to be the Unstoppable Cause in your life …let’s chat!
