Being Happy: Step 1 – Take Responsibility

About Me

I’m not a self-development guru but I am interested in the area and have studied many of the best practitioners. This series of blog entries summarises the main themes I’ve seen reoccurring time and time again: a series of universally accepted principles that really should be taught to our children at school.

I don’t pretend to be great at all of these – far from it. However, I know from experience that when I work on each of them, my life becomes more productive, richer and happier.

Just to reiterate, I am not preaching or evangelising these principles. I’m simply summarising what I see as the most important of them so that you can think about incorporating them into your day. If they make sense to you, I suggest applying them one at a time until each becomes a habit and part of your natural outlook on life.

Step1 : Taking Responsibility

You’re probably familiar with the concept of “stimulus-response” as in the famous experiment by Pavlov in which he trained dogs to salivate when they hear a bell which had previously been rung whenever there was a sausage in the vicinity.

The stimulus (the bell) lead directly to the response (dribbling). In a similar way, the stimulus of being cut up on the motorway might lead to the response of sticking two fingers up, honking your horn and chasing the offender. Or you might feel miserable because the weather’s wet or because you’ve just heard a sad story on the news.

However, there is an essential difference between animals and humans. Animals have no choice about responding to a stimulus, humans do. If you feel miserable on a cloudy day, you’re giving control over your mood to an outside force (the weather) about which you can do nothing. If you get stressed when someone overtakes you on the motorway and then cuts in, you’re allowing that person’s behaviour to stress you. Note the verbs: “giving” and “allowing”. You see, it’s your choice how you react to any stimulus: you choose whether to react with anger, sadness, calmness or even not to react at all.

It might feel as though you are taking control by reacting but, in fact, you are giving up control to the stimulus just as surely as if you were a dog salivating over a sausage. The truly strong, empowering thing to do is to stop, think and then respond in accordance with your values.

One of the best ways to make yourself more effective is to work on those things you can influence and ignore those things you can’t. The weather doesn’t make you miserable, it’s your reaction to it that does so: this is why one person’s gorgeous sunny day is another’s wasp-infested slice of hell.

By only trying to exercise control over things you can control (and this rarely includes other people), you focus your energies in productive areas and greatly reduce your stress. If the weather’s crap (the UK is locked in a new Ice Age as I write this) then don’t let it get you down: work out how you’re going to control those things you can. If you’re unable to drive anywhere (as we are at present) then work on managing with what you have at home. Think about helping your vulnerable neighbours out. Clear the snow from in front of your house and car. Enjoy it!

Don’t underestimate the power of this. By taking responsibility for how you react, you stop blaming the world for your misfortunes and this is empowering (after all if you stop believing that the weather can make you miserable, you’ve just given yourself the power to be happy). It also makes you more forgiving of others and much less affected by their weaknesses.

Do what you can about what you can influence: and remember that your reactions to everything that happens are entirely in your control. Viktor Frankl, a concentration camp victim and psychiatrist reasoned that he has complete control over his thoughts and reactions and, in that understanding, more freedom than his prison camp guards. His is a humbling story and well worth reading.

Further Reading: I came across this principle first in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. This was an enormously influential experience (I listened to the audio of a seminar) and very much affected my way of looking at life and my performance.