Who is to Blame?

“People may fail many times but they only become failures when they begin to blame someone else.”
Author Unknown

I love the above quote and believe it is true. Set backs and failures are part of life, but we only become failures when we do not take personal accountability or responsibility for them. Too often people find ways to blame something outside of themselves for their problems. This is the easy way out. However doing this takes away our ability to correct and overcome our problems and essentially makes us helpless. When we blame something or someone other than ourselves for our mistakes and short comings, we only hurt ourselves.

Blaming others and not taking full accountability for our lack of success essentially means we have no control over our lives or our outcomes. Instead we believe that outside forces will always determine our success and results, thus it is the luck of the draw whether we come out on top or not. However this simply is not true and learning to change our attitude about mistakes and failures will allow us to be in control of our own destiny and will empower us to create our own success. When we don’t place blame, we remain in control of our lives.

For example, recently the rehab center that I run had a poor month financially. At first glance, it was easy for me to say our occupancy rate was lower than it has been in years due to the fact that people were just not needing our services at this time. Indeed, each rehab center in the area struggled to maintain census and thus turn a profit so there was not much I could do about our poor financial month, right? Wrong! In fact, the number of things I could have done to improve our financial performance is nearly limitless. When reviewing my financials I saw some waste—meaning we spent more money in areas than we needed too. Digging further I also found we did not maximize our revenue in all areas possible thus a quick skim of the numbers tells me I can only blame myself for our lack of performance regardless of the many exterior factors that contributed to our results. Most often, when a mistake is made, there is almost always something we could have done better to avoid the mistake or failure, and when we accept this as truth, our ability to be successful in the future greatly increases.

Now, our society teaches us we should blame others, pointing fingers is the way to go, and holding yourself responsible is crazy; however this could not be further from the truth. When we blame others, we become dependent on them. Contrarily, a life of personal accountability allows us to be free, and thus leads to a much more rewarding and fruitful life. Rather than blame others, why not find ways inside ourselves to be better and produce greater outcomes? Rather than looking out the window to point fingers at external forces, why don’t we focus our attention on looking inside ourselves on what we can control to make things better? Why not use our own talents and abilities to overcome challenges and realize our goals and dreams rather than rely on others? Why should we not take control of our own success?

What I am sharing is not easy for anyone, because it is human nature to shift blame. But those of us who learn to not blame others and rather take full accountability for our lives will become much more respected, and successful. In the end, taking responsibilities for our failures will result in a much happier, rewarding, and prosperous life.

Building Better Relationships

Often we take people for granted, label them, brush them off, ignore them, or treat them poorly. I am definitely guilty of all of these. The sad thing is we have little to gain in life if we deny this fact that people are important. Indeed, our relationships in life play a huge role in our happiness and success.

People are much more than what their title, position in life, their “past”, or appearance makes them to be. When we judge others we may lose meaningful opportunities to learn and develop relationships. Yes, relationships are essential to a meaningful life, and the ability to build strong relationships is an important leadership trait. It is true that often we can learn just as much from others experiences as our own. Thus understanding the importance of relationships and learning how to nurture and develop them is imperative to us all. Below are a few simple ideas on how to build better relationships…

#1 Feel Important

Try to make other people feel important. This will go a long way in building stronger relationships. If we develop the ability to sincerely make others feel good about themselves, we will become great relationships builders. We can help others feel important by genuinely listening to them and taking sincere interest in what they have to say. We can make comments about what they are sharing and give compliments frequently. When we do this, others feel good and will want to be around us.

#2 Smile

A smile is so simple but it can have such a big impact on others. Smiles open the door to further conversations. Smiles express friendliness, compassion, enthusiasm, happiness, and acceptance. Smiles invite others to approach and get to know you. If we learn to smile, we will meet more people and make more friends. A smile provides a positive boost to any relationship.

#3 Really Listen

Listening is such an important part of relationship building because so few people actually really listen. There are many people who fake it, or only half-way listen; but if we can discipline ourselves and learn to really listen, we will be better relationship builders. And again, when we encourage others to talk and we genuinely listen, it makes people feel great. (see #1)

#4 Remember

To be honest, this sometimes can be one of my greatest weaknesses. Good relationship builders remember what they’ve learned about others. Remembering conversations, events, or anything that we’ve talked about before with someone shows we were truly listening and are interested and that we care. Those who have to ability to remember will become good relationship builders.

#5 Open Up

Some of us are closed and reserved and thus we don’t share a lot personal information with others. We engage in small talk and simply skim the surface of topics when communicating with others. Good relationship builders however are more comfortable in opening up, having deeper conversations with others, and showing trust toward others by sharing details and more personal information. When we learn to do this, become more open and comfortable with others, people feel closer bonds and a stronger relationship is developed.

So whether we like it or not, people are important! And the relationships we develop in life are critical to our success and happiness. We must strive to give each person we meet our sincere attention and listen to their experiences and opinions. Let’s start developing our relationship building skills today by following the simple suggestions above. As we do, we will become much more effective leaders and our lives will be blessed.