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.