Do you know anyone who seems to live in near constant complaint? Nothing ever seems right, good enough or fair?
Most of us do know someone like that; in fact, most of us have been that way at least occasionally. I know that as much as I have taught this stuff, I keep finding myself in what I call "victim mentality." My good friend, Mark Samuel (author of The Power of Personal Accountability and Creating the Accountable Organization) refers to this as being "stuck in the victim loop." In fact, I like "victim loop" so much that if Mark doesn't mind, I'll just borrow that term from him and use it here. Is that OK, Mark?
So, what is the victim loop?
If someone complains about being forced to do something, doesn't that sound a bit like being a "victim?"
Now "victim" is one loaded term. We all know of circumstances where being victimized is a pretty darn accurate description of what happened.
People are injured physically, emotionally and mentally every day in ways that seem completely out of their control. Little babies who suffer at the hands of an abusive adult are perhaps the most easily understood and most heart wrenching example of someone who has been victimized.
So, let's be really, really clear here. I am not talking about something so obscene as a little child being abused by some beast of an adult. And if you have had the misfortune of being victimized in this way, my heart aches for you.
What I am talking about is the sense of being victimized that we often encounter in the act of daily life.
You know the drill - the person at the office who constantly whines or complains about their job or boss or the customer. And they complain about the job or boss or customer just about every day. And yet they still seem to keep showing up every day so they can be "victimized" by the job or boss or customer.
You may even know people who belong to the "Ain't It Awful Club." You know that club, don't you? That's the club that meets most every day, in the local pub or over a latte, where members show up to swap stories of how awful life has been to them (today, yesterday, last month, back when they were blah, blah, blah). This club specializes in the art of "one-down-man's-ship." "You think that's bad, wait until you hear this one."
The stories and complaints swapped every day about life being unfair are the ones we want to address and will refer to as "victim" stories.
Victim - Accountable
"I recommend that the Statue of Liberty be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast."
-- Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
Let's work with this notion of victim for a moment. Pick an event from your adult life that felt unfair, an event where something happened to you where you apparently had no control. It happened to you, it wasn't your fault, life just wasn't fair.
A note of caution here: you have my deepest sympathy if you were abused or harmed in some despicable way, and a part of me rises up in rage when I encounter those kinds of circumstances. Please do not use that kind of instance for this exercise.
For the purposes of this exercise, we would ask that you pick another event to examine, something from your adult life, something that felt unfair and outside your control.
Your job now is to "tell" that story from the point of view of having been a victim. You had nothing whatsoever to do with the circumstances other than having been there, having it happen to you. Think of telling the story with sufficient dramatic flair that you could possibly win "Victim of the Year" or the Academy Award for Best Victim. Imagine telling the story to someone and that you are trying to elicit some tears of sympathy. You know, the kind of "poor me" thing we all seem to know.
Tell that story now. Embellish a bit if you like. Whatever you do, you may not say anything like "I should have known better" or "I saw it coming" or "I knew it." Those are the kinds of things that accountable people say. "It came out of the blue" or "I had no idea what hit me" or "despite my best efforts" - those are the kinds of things we are looking for.
The CPA Approach to Accountability
Now let's try the complete opposite. Let's imagine that you were 100% accountable for the situation and tell the story from that perspective. This time around, tell the story with the goal of winning the Academy Award for Most Accountable Person of the Year. Whatever it was that happened, it only happened because of something you did or something you allowed to happen.
We call this the CPA approach: how did you Create, Promote or Allow this event to take place. Create: something that you did overtly to cause the event; Promote: something you did to provoke the event; Allow: something you saw coming and simply did nothing to get out of the way.
Go ahead now. Tell that story again. Only this time, your job is to tell it from the point of view of being 100% accountable. Not even the slightest hint of being victimized is permitted. "They tricked me" - not allowed. "I had no idea" - not allowed. "No one could have seen it coming" - not allowed.
Even if you are not sure how you created, promoted or allowed the event, tell the story as though you did. Make it up if you have to. You might be surprised to learn how many people just "make it up" and all of a sudden discover a small but important fact that had been overlooked.
(When we "make it up," the thing we make up has to come from somewhere, and the most common place to find the made up story is right inside our own selves. Curiously, we rarely make up something that doesn't have at least some notion of reality to it.)
Having done this exercise now with thousands of people all over the world, I can tell you that a good 90% of all people who have ever done this exercise come up with at least some level of accountability that they had not previously noticed. Once that first bit of previously unnoticed accountability enters into the awareness, all kinds of accountability dominoes start to fall. Awareness grows and people frequently discover power or capability to influence life they had not previously noticed.
We will address what I call the What if I principle in greater depth in a subsequent post. For now, consider this question: What if everything were a result of something you had Created, Promoted or Allowed? If that were true, how much power would that suggest that you have over your own life, over your ability to create life exactly as you might like it, over your ability to change just about any circumstance?
Obviously, if that were true, it would suggest that you have almost limitless capability to create life exactly as you would prefer it.
So, think about this one for a moment: if you played along with the notion that you were 100% accountable for everything, and discovered greater power than you had previously noticed, would that be worth discovering? Of course it would.
Perhaps not so obvious is that if you were to avoid looking at life from the possibility of being 100% accountable, you could very well miss the most important key to your own success and satisfaction, that of your own role in your own fulfillment.
So, you choose: would you rather play along with the possibility of being 100% accountable or would you rather stick to the victim stance of "life happened to me" and I had no choice.
We will continue building on this notion of response-ability and accountability next week.
I'd love to hear from you. Please do leave a comment here or drop me an email at Russell (at) russellbishop.com.
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If you want more information on how you can apply this kind of reframing to your life and to your job, about a few simple steps that may wind up transforming your life, please download a free chapter from my new book, Workarounds That Work. You'll be glad you did.
Russell Bishop is an educational psychologist, author, executive coach and management consultant based in Santa Barbara, Calif. You can learn more about my work by visiting my website at www.RussellBishop.com. You can contact me by e-mail at Russell (at) russellbishop.com.