Personal Responsibility Part 2: Are You Asking Yourself The Right Questions?

Recently, I read a book called The Traveler’s Gift by Andy Andrews. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you get yourself a copy and read it ASAP. It’s an amazing book that teaches the seven decisions you need to make in your life to achieve personal success.

I’m now reading Mastering The Seven Decisions That Determine Personal Success, which is the follow-up to that book and covers those seven decisions in more detail.

The first decision or principle is “The Buck Stops Here” and it refers to personal responsibility, which really hit home for me since I had just written about personal responsibility in my last post. It talks about how many people, when faced with adversity and difficulty in their lives, become mired in self-pity and spend a lot of wasted time and effort asking “Why me?” I know it’s true because I’ve asked myself and God that question many times in my life. Why Me?

The answer I got from Andy Andrews (the same answer I also seem to get from God) is Why Not Me? Everybody in life has challenges, adversities and road blocks they must overcome. Read the biography of any successful person and you’ll see their life littered with many hardships and rough patches. No one is immune from it and no one has ever been guaranteed a struggle-free life.

The difference between the people who become successful and the ones who stay stuck in miserable lives is what they learn from those rough patches and how they apply what they’ve learned to improve their lives in the future.

They don’t waste time asking Why Me? Or Whose to blame? Instead, they accept what is and learn valuable lessons by asking themselves the right questions. Ask yourself the right questions and you’ll have a much easier time coming up with the right answers and find it a lot easier to move forward in your life.

Next time you experience a rough patch, or if you’re in one now, take some time to ask yourself some of these right questions and learn from the answers you get. Here are some of the questions you should ask yourself:

• What did I do or not do that contributed to the circumstances?
• What could I have done differently?
• What can I do differently in the future to prevent this from happening again?
• What can I do differently to prepare myself in case it DOES happen again?
• What can I do, right now, to fix the problem and move my life in a positive direction?

If you take personal responsibility for where you are now and ask yourself the right questions, you’ll end up with the answers you need to begin moving your life in a positive direction.

I’ve learned a lot from reading The Traveler’s Gift and plan to learn a lot more from reading Mastering The Seven Decisions That Determine Personal Success. As I begin to incorporate these success principles into my life, I hope to share with you the results I get, so you can learn from both my mistakes and my achievements.

I’d like it even better if you read each of these books yourselves and share your experiences with me. We can travel this road together, providing encouragement during the rough patches and celebrating our achievements together. How about it? Are you ready for an exciting ride?