This is a pretty cool video and book about taking ownership when things go wrong.
This relates to the psychological state of ‘learned helplessness’ which is defined as:
“a condition in which a person suffers from a sense of powerlessness, arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed. It is thought to be one of the underlying causes of depression.”
To completely avoid this sense of powerlessness, when anything goes wrong, instead of first looking to blame things out of your control like other people and ‘the universe’; look first to see if you could have changed something.
A classic is when people say “I don’t have enough time”, instead of “I could do that, but I would need to reprioritise things” or “I can’t find the time because I’m obsessed with MMA and train every night!”. Usually to protect the ego (sub consciously) or because of a level of learned helplessness, people will avoid citing factors that are under their own control.
Another example- say you lose an MMA fight, instead of blaming the ref, or bad luck, analyze your own performance and preparation and see if you could have done something differently. This empowers you and motivates you to correct things and move forward, instead of sulking and potentially giving up.
Weight loss is another one – “gyms are too expensive”, “I don’t have time to exercise”, “fruit and veg is so expensive” etc. You could afford a gym if you cancelled satellite TV, or you could train at home or go for a run or hike instead of paying for the gym.
You can also take ownership of problems and issues when you’re in groups, instead of letting someone else take care of it, do it yourself. For example, yesterday I took extreme ownership by changing the toilet roll in work, even though there was about 10% of it left…
