Creators Circle #8: Taking Responsibility for Your Life

In this Creators Circle call, we discuss the importance of both self-forgiveness, as well as taking responsibility. When your life isn’t going the way you’d like it to go, it’s easy to blame other people. But it’s a lot more productive to take responsibility, and see what’s going on within that might be drawing this circumstance to you.

[mbr_is_logged_in]
[mbr_update_contact last_creators_circle_viewed=”7″]
[mbr_is_for tags=”11″]

Topics Discussed in This Call

• [01:12] Taking Responsibility
• [07:06] It’s Not About Fault
• [08:51] Three Examples
• [16:45] Forgiveness Does Not Mean Saying It’s Okay
• [20:12] Dwelling on Past Hurts
• [22:12] Freeing Up Energy

Transcript

Brandon: Hey, everyone. This is the Creators Circle call #8 we’re at now. Today we are discussing whatever happens to come up, as always. This is the place for discussing law of attraction, asking questions about the law of attraction, and seeing where the discussion goes. For those who are listening to the recording, if you want to get the transcript, you can sign up underneath this recording. Also, feel free to leave comments on this call. I always like comments.

[01:12] Taking Responsibility

The topic I was going to start out with: I was talking to a client last week sometime. If you guys remember, I was talking about self-forgiveness a few weeks ago. We were doing some self-forgiveness work, going back through previous situations and forgiving oneself for certain things that happened. We were talking about something on the opposite end of the spectrum from self-forgiveness but does the same kind of job, which to me is taking responsibility. Taking responsibility is when you have situations in your life which either keep repeating or you keep dwelling on them or something like that. You blame someone else, or you blame life, or you blame the universe, or you blame God. Anyone else except yourself. When you blame yourself, that’s self-forgiveness. When you turn the blame outwards or have something that happens over and over and over again and you don’t acknowledge it, that’s where taking responsibility comes in.

To me, I think the reason that is very useful is for obvious reasons. We’re creators. We’re doing the law of attraction here. When you have something where you’re not taking ownership of it—it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re at fault. It’s not about fault or anything like that. This is about being able to move on. I always give the example of the family member I have. You know who I mean, Christine. She always used to get jobs where she was overworked and underpaid. She would complain about it. That’s not technically, in a physical sense, her fault. I would never say, “Oh, that’s your fault.”

Justin: No. “It’s your fault!”

Brandon: [laughs] But, it still is a good candidate for taking responsibility. “Oh, it’s that boss’s fault. It’s that job’s fault. It’s the rules. Everyone always overworks me.” What’s the saying out there? What’s the common denominator? It’s you.

Justin: You. Go ahead.

Brandon: That’s a common situation where taking responsibility is really helpful. If you just say, “It’s something that keeps happening in life. Everyone takes advantage of me,” it’s not helpful because we don’t learn anything from it. The whole point of what we’re doing here is to learn from our actions, lessons, and mistakes and do something about it. Take responsibility. I realize this keeps happening to me for some reasons, and I’m going to take ownership of it. I don’t maybe even know what I did that could have contributed to this, but it keeps happening, so there must be something in me that keeps drawing this to me.

Justin: Sometimes it’s just a mindset. It’s not whose fault it is or who done it. It’s not a detective novel. We don’t care about that so much, but we do want to make sure that (for me) if it happened to me, even if it’s not my fault, that means it happened to me anyway. I don’t want it to happen again, so I’m going to make sure it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter how. I’m going to take responsibility and ownership. This right here for me—I’ve allowed other people sometimes to influence me to do stuff that just didn’t feel right. What I’ve decided to do over the last several years—especially last year—is if I stay on my path, I might give lip service to something that you tell me, but if it’s not on my path, I’m not doing it. That’s just it. I don’t care how much it hurts your feelings. Your feelings do not matter to me. I actually really mean that. I’m not trying to be mean about it. 

Some people want to say, “Well, your feelings matter, but—” No, actually your feelings don’t. I’m sorry. They just don’t. Because I’ve learned, I have suffered too much damage from people who thought they knew this. And all of a sudden, I have to repair it. I’m in a situation now (I’ve been in it for years) I have to repair because I allowed certain things to happen. It was on me. I always tell people, “If I had just been left to my own devices, I’d have been fine.” But I allowed other people to get me off path, so now I have to re-forge it. Is it their fault? Yes, kind of, because they could have really just chilled out. But they didn’t, and I suffered for it. So I’m going to now make sure that never happens again.

Brandon: Exactly.

Justin: Like I told someone a while ago, when people start acting a certain way, I just distance myself, and no one is excluded. Friends and family, I don’t care. I’ve learned that it’s too devastating to not do it. And I’m not saying be rude. You don’t have to be rude to people. Give them their “Hey, I appreciate you’re helping me out.” Give them lip service. Even investigate the thing they tell you to investigate a little bit, just so you can show that you actually appreciate what they did. But don’t do it. Don’t actually do it.

[07:06] It’s Not About Fault

Brandon: Yes, it’s like when you take responsibility for something, it’s not about whose fault it is. It’s just about…

Christine: It’s, “Oops, I didn’t want that.”

Brandon: Right. Do you want this in your life? Way too many people—I feel even in the LOA community…

Justin: Because when it gets in your life, it’s sometimes hard to get it out. [laughs]

Brandon: Right. But I feel like a lot of people even in the LOA community play too much of the victim role. “Ah, well, this is what my life is. This is just how things are. Maybe I was meant to be this way.” They don’t take responsibility and ownership and say, “You know what? This is my life, and if it’s my life, I can live the way I want to.” If I want abundance, I can have abundance. If I want love, I can have love. If I want health, I can have health. Whatever it is that I want to have. In the example I gave, if I want to get paid for the work I do and get paid well for it and not get taken advantage of, then that’s what I’m going to get.

Justin: That’s right.

Brandon: Maybe I haven’t gotten it so far, but there must be something in me that is drawing that into my life, and I’m going to find that and change it and get different results.

Justin: Just change your vibration is what you have to do. You cannot allow that. Taking responsibility—it doesn’t matter whose fault it is. That does not matter, literally, at all. You just want to make sure that you get what you want and need.

[08:51] Three Examples

Brandon: Something else it reminds me of is very fear-based. We give up our power to outside circumstances. I’ll give two really potent examples here. The first one is with money. Actually, I can give three examples. Pretty much any area of life, I can give an example. Let’s take money for an example. People say, “Well, the money system is rigged against us. The poor keep getting poorer. The rich keep getting richer. The government takes from us and they give it to the rich, blah blah blah. I can’t change my circumstances.” How many people do you hear?

Justin: A lot.

Brandon: Whining and complaining about not being able to get money.

Justin: It literally does not matter.

Brandon: Right. Seriously, I don’t want to hear it. [laughs]

Justin: Here’s the thing. It might true, but so what?

Brandon: It could be true.

Justin: You might want to do something about it for yourself.

Brandon: You get to choose what story you want to live in. Do you want to live in the world where that’s true, where poor people are getting taken advantage of and you can’t do something about your circumstances? Be my guest and do that. But if you want to live in a reality where you get to choose the life that you want to lead and you have the power to do that, then step into that reality. Don’t make excuses about it because those aren’t compatible with the type of reality that we’re talking about. You have to do that on a daily basis. So you can’t make excuses about that kind of stuff.

Another example is relationships. People will say, “All the good ones are taken,” for example. Or all the types of people they’re looking for—money, or they’re vain and they are looking for someone with good looks. Especially with guys, you have the stereotype of the “nice guy.” Never gets chosen.

Justin: You have to decide what your angle is going to be and play that angle and get those people that are going to choose you.

Brandon: In relationships we have this whole same kind of thing, this negative belief system that is playing into the whole thing. All it’s doing is justifying why you are where you are and why you’re not getting the results you want to get. Again, if you choose, you can live in the type of reality where you can have the kind of relationship you want. No justifications. No excuses. You can step into that. 

Same thing with health. It’s a huge one. This one is big on my radar right now because one of my newest goals is to do with health. You read things. Sometimes it’s hard not to get caught up in this fear-mongering. Especially when you read things like, “This type of food is horrible and it’s going to kill you. You can’t have any of it.”

Justin: Different diets work for different people.

Brandon: “This type of thing is always horrible in every circumstance.”

Christine: And it gives you cancer. That one’s my favorite.

Brandon: The corporations are trying to poison you, GMO’s, chemicals, processed stuff.

Justin: Find a way to get them out. That’s what I did.

Brandon: I read this article about this person who thought that, weirdly enough, polyunsaturated fats (oils that are liquid, basically, canola oil, stuff like that) are basically from the devil. This is poison. You read these things. Some people will say the same things about carbs. Choose something, and someone will say something about it.

Justin: The thing is, you just have to find a way to get them out, like what I did. Hey, just detox. Done. Right there.

Brandon: Or, more generally, the fears are overblown.

Justin: What I tell people is there’s a base diet that sort of works for most people. After you spin off of that, that just depends on the person. I have seen anything from the Paleo diet, which I thought was perfect but does not work for me. I just can’t do that no carbs. I met somebody who did meat, sweet potatoes, and vegetables. She never touched fruit or anything else. I would prefer over Paleo. For me, this is just talking about health and diets, I have to have a carb. I can go without meat a lot easier than I can without the heavy carbs.

Brandon: Oh, I know. I like carbs.

Justin: I just don’t function as well. I’ll cut the meat out. Screw that.

Brandon: Any type of food out there, people are demonizing it. The fact is, every food has its place. If you don’t want to eat a certain type of food, it’s your choice. Every food has its place. There’s nothing you can never eat.

Christine: I know a friend of mine who has to eat a lot of meat or she gets sick. She has to eat—she’s hypoglycemic or something.

Justin: Yes, different diets work for different people. Go ahead.

Brandon: The point is, the same kind of stories are going. “The corporations are trying to poision us. Everything is so horrible.” It’s really easy to get into this fear-based thing. What can you do? If you can do something about it—one big example is factory farming. It’s not a great reality, that’s true. If you don’t like that and your thing is to get local meat or grass-fed, then that’s your thing. But don’t feed into the fear about it. Focusing on the solution is a lot more useful than focusing on the problem.

Justin: We aren’t saying that’s not true. We didn’t say anything wasn’t true or it was true. We just said to take the responsibility and find a way to solve your specific dilemma.

Brandon: Right. There’s nothing. Some of these things may be true in certain circumstances. They may be things you believe in that you are passionate about that mean something to you, but don’t get lost in the fear. Don’t get lost in this demonizing of certain things or feeling you have no power. You have a lot of power. You have tons of power. You can change your reality to what you want it to look like.

[16:45] Forgiveness Does Not Mean Saying It’s Okay

So, any area of life, if you don’t like how it’s going, you can change it. Especially as you get better at the law of attraction. Over the last two years, I’ve gotten a lot better at how I use it. I see one area of life. I think I’d like to change that. I find ways of changing it. I start manifesting it. I start manifesting different results or whatever. You can change it. Sometimes it amazes me, the results I’ve gotten in a pretty short period of time.

Justin: Stick with it. It might take you 6 to 8 months to get a good rhythm, but once you find that, it might take you a little while. It’s not instantaneous, but once you get rolling, you’re unstoppable in that area.

Brandon: Exactly. There’s nothing you can’t change in your life if you want to change it. That is taking responsibility. Look through your life. What are you unhappy with? What are you blaming others about? What are you even resentful about sometimes? Take each of those situations. It’s hard because sometimes we have blind spots. “That is definitely that person’s fault.”

Justin: Here’s the thing I say: Yes, they did do that, but I allowed them to do it. I read this recently. You don’t have to forgive them to forgive them. You just have to be able to move on. 

Brandon: That’s exactly what I told Christine recently. [laughs] There’s someone from my childhood that I used to get along with really, really well. A really good family friend. This person hurt me a lot some years ago. Whether she meant to or not, who knows. It happened. It’s not something I dwell on every day or something. There’s a difference between forgiving and forgetting. Christine and I were talking about this situation. Christine, you said, “You should get along with her. You should forgive her.” I said, “I did forgive her, but it doesn’t mean that everything’s great. It doesn’t mean we click.”

Justin: No, we may not ever click. Yes, no, no.

Brandon: Forgiveness doesn’t mean, “Hey, what you did was okay.” Or else, how could you ever forgive? How could you forgive (it wasn’t this kind of severe sort of thing, but let’s say the most serious) an abuser if forgiving meant what they did was okay? It will never be okay.

Justin: The other thing you can do is rebalance your energy score with that person. You can do anything you need to to move on, but take responsibility for it. I would never tell somebody, “Hey, it’s your fault you got abused.”

Christine: No, no.

Justin: I’m not doing that.

Brandon: No, of course not.

Justin: But I do say, “Hey, you have to take responsibility for it.” What I mean is move on and move the energy.

[20:12] Dwelling on Past Hurts

Brandon: If it’s still in your life emotionally, that’s yours. That’s not theirs unless it’s ongoing, where you should do something to get out of it to the best of your ability.

Christine: I think there’s a difference between “it’s okay to move on” and if you’re bitter, and you don’t really move on and you think you did. That’s not a good thing.

Brandon: Yes, but sometimes they can look very similar. If I talk about this person, I’m never going to say, “Oh, yeah, she did this, and it was fine.” I don’t feel like I’m bitter. I just feel like it was a stinky thing to do.

Christine: I’m not saying you want bitter. I’m saying there are people who hold grudges unhealthfully. But then they get sick. They get diseases.

Brandon: If it’s something you’re dwelling on, here’s the difference. If it’s something you’re dwelling on—if you think about that person and think, “I just don’t like what they did in the past,” and it’s every once in a while, it’s not really going to affect you. But if you’re dwelling on it daily or weekly or pretty frequently, then that’s something you have to heal.

Justin: I don’t dwell on things. That’s no good. But I will never forget.

Brandon: There’s a difference. If there’s something from your past that you don’t like how it went, that’s fair. That’s going to be there. As long as you don’t dwell on it. That’s when it gets unhealthy. You take responsibility. If it’s ongoing, then do your best to take care of it if you can. No one’s going to fault you as long as you’re doing your best. If it’s something in the past and it’s still emotionally with you—you’re dwelling on it and letting it affect you—then you have to take responsibility and say, “You know what? This is over. I’m going to move on with my life. It doesn’t mean it was okay. It doesn’t mean that I liked it. It wasn’t anything that should have happened. But it means that I’m going to move on with my life and not let this be an active part of my energy anymore.

[22:12] Freeing Up Energy

When it’s an active part of your energy, what happens? You draw more things like it to you. You don’t want to do that. That’s what taking responsibility means. As a recap, self-forgiveness is when you blame yourself unnecessarily for something you feel you did in the past or something you didn’t do that you should have done, whatever. That helps you, when you forgive yourself for that, even if it’s something silly that is really not your fault. It lets you free that energy so you can move on.

Taking responsibility is the other end, where you’re blaming someone or life or just upset about something that you’re feeling stuck about. You take ownership. You say, “I have power to change this, so I’m going to change it.” It’s two ends of the same spectrum, two sides of the same coin. You’re forgiving yourself or taking responsibility, sometimes both, and moving on. That helps you to free that energy up.

Justin: You can forgive yourself for your part in it. You can definitely forgive yourself. “If I had any part in this,” you can do the self-forgiveness thing. Then you take responsibility and move on.

Brandon: I think it’s really helpful, especially when you have a manifestation that is around one of these areas, to go back (if something’s still bothering you) and if you have to forgive yourself, forgive yourself. If you have to take responsibility, take responsibility. Just do what you have to do. When I’ve done this with clients, they always say it feels looser. It feels like there’s a weight off their shoulders. It’s an important thing.

That is everything for today. I appreciate the discussion and those who are listening to the recording. Again, if you want to leave a comment, feel free. We always like comments. Or, you can get the transcript by subscribing. Otherwise, we’ll see everyone next week. We’re thinking about changing the time because it doesn’t seem to work for a lot of people. We’ll keep you updated about that. If you want updates about it, sign up for the list. You can enter your email below this recording. Otherwise, I hope everyone has a wonderful week. We’ll see everyone next week. Bye, everyone.

Justin and Christine: Bye.

[ELSE_is_for]

Topics Discussed in This Call

• [01:12] Taking Responsibility
• [07:06] It’s Not About Fault
• [08:51] Three Examples
• [16:45] Forgiveness Does Not Mean Saying It’s Okay
• [20:12] Dwelling on Past Hurts
• [22:12] Freeing Up Energy

Transcript

[mbr_compare value1=”[mbr_db_first_name]” cmp=”NE” value2=””][mbr_db_first_name], you[ELSE_compare]You[/mbr_compare] are logged in but have not yet subscribed to the Creators Circle.

If you would like to see the transcript, just click the button below and you’ll get instant access. Please only click once, as it can take several seconds to process.

[mbr_tag assign=”11″ button_text=”Sign Up Now” redirect=”#reload#”]
[/mbr_is_for]
[ELSE_is_logged_in]

Topics Discussed in This Call

• [01:12] Taking Responsibility
• [07:06] It’s Not About Fault
• [08:51] Three Examples
• [16:45] Forgiveness Does Not Mean Saying It’s Okay
• [20:12] Dwelling on Past Hurts
• [22:12] Freeing Up Energy

Transcript

The transcript is for members only. If you’d like to get the transcript, please sign up for the Creators Circle for free below.

[mbr_form form_id=”25″]
[mbr_set_custom_field field=”21″ value=”7″]

If you are already on the list, then you may simply not have logged in.

[mbr_dynamic_login]
[/mbr_is_logged_in]