The Language of Irresponsibility vs. Responsibility

What comes to mind when you hear the word responsibility?   For a long time whenever I would hear the word ‘responsibility’ I would get childhood flashbacks of needing to take out the trash, do the dishes, pull the weeds, walk the dog, etc.  Externally imposed ‘things I need to do’.

To say the least I didn’t have the best relationship with the concept. Over the past 8 years of practicing Neuro-Semantics I have learned to greatly value responsibility, and I have even come to recognize it as the core of self-actualization.

• How is your relationship with responsibility?  
• Do you ever find yourself blaming, feeling irresponsible, or even playing the victim?
• Would you like to improve your relationship with responsibility?

One of the things that began to shift my experience of responsibility was understanding what responsibility really was.   This happened when I saw the word broken down into its component pieces: response and ability.

Responsibility is about your ability to respond.  In other words, responsibility is not about what happens to you, but about how you respond to what happens.

When you take ownership over your responses you are being responsible.  When you don’t take ownership over your responses you are being irresponsible.   A much deeper understanding of the concept than thinking about responsibility as just “the things I need to do”, isn’t it?

One of the ways to recognize irresponsibility in ourselves and others is to listen for ‘the language of irresponsibility.”

Do any of these sound familiar?

• “You make me X.”
• “He/she makes me X.”
• “It makes me X.”
• “I am X because of Y” (when Y is something external).

If you have done some study of NLP in the past you may recognize these as Cause-Effect statements in the Meta-Model of language.  These are all cause-effect statements when you are at the effect of something external.

Here is another language pattern of irresponsibility:

• “I need to X” (when the need is based on something external).
• “I have to X” (when the need is based on something external).
• “I must X” (when the need is based on something external).
• And of course we can impose this on others! “You need to X!”

If you have done some study of NLP in the past you may recognize these as ‘Modal operators of necessity’ in the Meta-Model of language.  These are statements that are framed in terms of necessity & requirement as opposed to being framed in terms of wants and desires.

If you would like to become more empowered and responsible in yourself and to empower others to become more responsible for themselves you will want to train your ears to recognize these patterns, as well as be aware of the new patterns where you would like to lead your mind.

The key to higher levels of responsibility is to shift the locus of control from outside to inside, and to shift from externally imposed necessity to internally decided upon choice.

Instead of “he makes me feel sad”, we would shift to “I make myself feel sad when he does that.”

Instead of “traffic makes me angry” it becomes, “I make myself frustrated when I am in traffic.”

Instead of “I need to take out the garbage” it becomes “I choose to take out the garbage.”

There are two extremely important caveats to pay attention to when shifting these patterns…

The first is that just changing the words, but not the feeling associated with the words, is not going to have a great impact on the pattern.  The key is to shift from a feeling of being at effect to a feeling of being at cause.   The key is to shift from a feeling of needing to do something to a feeling of choosing to do something.   This can be greatly facilitated with understanding and utilizing the Meta-States model of Neuro-Semantics.

The second caveat is that, if you are the type of person who tends to be over-responsible for others you will most likely feel the ‘need’ to ‘correct’ others when you hear them using these language patterns.  I highly recommend applying this pattern to yourself first. If we impose this model onto other people we can actually achieve the opposite effect of being over-responsible for them, in effect trying to take their responsibility from them.  

So if you hear someone else ‘misusing’ these language patterns, rather than focusing on what ‘they are doing,’ practice responsibility and focus on your response to what they are doing.     Once you become more proficient at taking higher levels of responsibility you will be much more adept at facilitating others to own their responsibility in a way that is healthy.  

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