Self-Actualization and Self-Responsibility

• Can you self-actualize without being self-responsible?
• Is self-responsibility a precondition of self-actualization?
• Can a person who doesn’t own and operate from self-responsibility unleash all his or her potentials?

You probably recognize that these questions are all rhetorical. Of course we can’t self-actualize without self-responsibility. Of course, self-responsibility is a precondition for actualizing one’s best potentials. If someone where to ask, “Why is that so? Why can we not self-actualize without self-responsibility?” what would you say?

Would you not explain that self-actualization is not an inevitability for us, but arises as a personal choice and one that occurs over time and which involves effort, focus, vision, and the whole actualizing of talents, dreams, and passions?

In this, self-actualization is not something that happens to us apart from our awareness, vision, and effort. Self-actualization does not come in a way that’s similar to how one wins a lottery. And that’s precisely why self-actualizing is not for the passive, the lazy, the unimaginative, those following the path of least resistance, the blamers, the complainers, or the whiners. It is for the response-able ones who catch a vision of finding and following their talents and passions and unleashing their potentials to become their best.

No wonder self-responsibility operates as one of the prerequisites of self-actualization and without it, there can be no actualizing of one’s best. Self-actualizing doesn’t happen apart from our mindful responses. In fact, it is indeed a function of our responses, our best responses— the performances that we create day-in and day-out as we seek to turn our dreams, visions, and values into reality.

Self-responsibility begins with our basic powers, our powers of thinking-and-emoting and speaking and behaving. It begins with this zone of power that we all have as our basic heritage of being human. That’s why owning and fully claiming these powers is the function for unleashing potentials. Only then can we begin to develop the self-responsibility that’s necessary. How self-responsible are you? Test yourself. Take the following sentence stem and generate a dozen endings. Keep repeating the stem until you generate many endings.

“If I took complete responsibility for what I think, what I feel, what I say, and what I do ...”

Don’t worry whether the endings you generate are positive or negative, that’s not the point. The point of the process is to increase awareness. It is to download what’s in the back of your mind (your meta-states and meta-frames) about responsibility. Doing that will then put you at choice point where you can use your executive level of mind to forge the path that you want.

“If I were to take full responsibility for all of my words . . .”

“If I were to take full responsibility for all of my states ...” ... for my attitudes, happiness, resilience, playfulness, seriousness, relationships, values, goals. etc.

Self-responsibility is owning our powers, and our expressions of them, and then taking a proactive stance to the things that need done in our lives to fulfill our dreams. That leads to yet another sentence stem that we can use to develop self-responsibility:

“If I were to take full responsibility for making my dreams and visions come true ...”

Obviously, self-responsibility is not for the faint of heart. It is not for those with low ego- strength; it is not for those who make their self-esteem, value, and worth conditional so that their self-esteem is always on the line. Self-responsibility takes us a long way along the path of self- actualization because we then stop wasting energy blaming, accusing, complaining, and whining. We get on with things. We look for what needs to be done, and we do it.

So what is self-responsibility and what are some of the ways we can describe it? The self- responsible are proactive. They initiate action, they think through decisions, they continuously question and learn, they identify their values, their visions, and stand up for them, they pursue their goals, they bounce back from set-backs, they are awake to their resources, they keep accessing their strengths, they boldly make decisions and follow through, they turn new learnings into habits, they make themselves accountable to others, they are great team players, they work with and through others, and so are socially responsible. They allow others to hold them accountable and, in fact, search for and build structures of accountability.

Nathaniel Branden in his book Taking Responsibility describes self-responsibility as follows:

“The essence of self-responsibility is the practice of making oneself the cause of the effects one wants, as contrasted with a policy of hoping or demanding that someone else ‘do something’ while one’s own contribution is to wait and suffer. It is through independence and self-responsibility that we attain personal power.” (p. 13)

If the heart of self-responsibility is “making oneself the cause of the effects one wants,” how do we do that? How do we make ourselves the cause of our desired effects? How do we develop the sense or feeling that we are the source of our actions, our thoughts, our choices?

The answer goes back to the meta-state of self-efficacy. This refers to the sense, the understanding, the belief, and the realization that we are able to make a difference, that we can always do something, and that we can trust our basic powers of mind, emotion, speech, and behavior for navigating our way through life. Unlike self-confidence which demands proof, historical evidence, and successful references, self-efficacy is more about the future and what we have not yet successfully accomplished. It is the meta-state of trust in self that we can figure it out, develop the skills, hone the required competencies, and make it happen. When we develop that meta-frame as our meta-state, then we are able to truly “make ourselves the source and the cause” of the results we want.

How self-responsible are you today? Where would you gauge yourself in this moment in time? If you were to become even 5 percent more self-responsible, what difference would that make toward actualizing your best self? [More about Self-Responsibility and Self-Actualization in the next two Reflections.]