“I had a good day at school today, except for recess,” my son answered when I asked him how his day was. He looked dejected.
“What happened at recess?” I asked.
“Well, I just had no one to play with,” he answered in a small voice, looking at the ground.
“What do you mean?” I asked. It sounded strange to me that no one else would be on the playground, so I assumed he might have been shunned for some reason. “Where was everyone else?”
“All my friends were playing soccer, so I had no one to play with.”
“Did you ask if you could play with them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I don’t know how to play soccer,” he answered, throwing his hands in the air in a hopeless gesture.
“Did you ask anyone to show you how to play?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He paused. “Well, I just didn’t want to play.”
Okay, fair enough. No point in doing something you don’t want to do. “Did you ask anyone else to play with you?”
“There was no one else to play with,” he answered.
That sounded strange to me. There would have been a lot of kids on the playground at recess, and I doubted that ALL of them were playing soccer. “There were no other kids playing any other games?”
“Well, yeah, of course,” he admitted. “But I didn’t know any of them.”
“You could have introduced yourself and asked them to play with you,” I suggested.
He looked at the ground. “You know sometimes I’m shy.”
“So you chose not to play with anyone,” I observed.
“No, I didn’t choose not to play with anyone. I just had no one to play with.”
Have you ever felt like that? You have several choices, none of which are particularly appealing to you, some of which might raise fears, and so you’d rather not make ANY choice. You decide to be helpless, let things happen, and claim that you had no choices.
Having NO choices is NOT the same as having choices you DON’T LIKE.
There are very few circumstances in life where you are truly helpless. You can decide to try something new, to have courage in the face of your fears, to move through something that might be unpleasant to get to something better.
And you can DECIDE to do nothing.
Being complacent is NOT the same as being helpless.
My son might not have wanted to play soccer, and that’s fine. He might not have been ready to face his shyness, and that’s fine, too. But to say that there was no one to play with and to imply that he had no choice in the matter is not an attitude I want him to grow up with.
And its not an attitude you should accept in yourself, either.
When you choose to do nothing, acknowledge that it is YOUR choice. Admit that you don’t know how to proceed, or that you’re not ready to take action, or even that you think doing nothing is the right thing to do in a given circumstance.
Don’t have a victim mentality, or a helplessness mentality.
Choices. We all make them.
Just don’t deny responsibility for them.
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Talk To Me! Have you ever had to make a choice you didn’t like? Did you admit that it was your choice, or did you pretend it wasn’t really your choice after all? Leave me a comment below and let me know!
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Hey, Jason
We more often then not know exactly what it’s going to take to get us to the next level. We keep asking ourselves the same questions because we don’t like the paths to the solution. Being successful isn’t complicated and it isn’t easy.
Great Post
Right on, Karl. So many people are just moments away from success if they could just keep taking the steps they know they should be taking.
For the most part, becoming an entrepreneur can be the most rewarding profession that we’ve ever followed–but there are times when there are things that we need to do that we don’t necessarily enjoy doing in order to follow the path to success.
Just remember that the pros FAR OUTWEIGH the cons and you will be able to accomplish the more *icky* tasks and get back to the fun stuff!
Heather
From Heather Taskovics´s blog… Staying The Course To Achieve Your Dreams
Sometimes it helps to focus on the ultimate result that you want, rather than just getting the task done. Usually the icky tasks are part of a greater goal (i.e. the fun stuff).
Accepting responsibility for our choices is not easy to do when we are growing up (and also holds true for many adults). I think this is particularly true when we don’t like the outcome of our choices. It is a lot easier to blame someone or something else. Thanks for your post, I enjoyed reading it.
Its not just the outcome of our choices that makes people want to blame others, but also when we have to choose between outcomes we don’t like (i.e. when there is no particular outcome that we actually want). This can happen when we focus on the next immediate choice we have, rather than looking ahead at our ultimate goals and making our choices based on that. Regardless, blaming others never helps.