173 Being a Victim vs a Creator
This is Anne with your Coaching on the Go.
Happy day to you.
I’m talking this week about levels of responsibility and how they affect your world.
How when you are not being responsible, you’re giving up your power in life.
And how when you stand in your responsibility, you’re not only the most powerful, but your life is the most incredible.
You can roll with the punches much easier.
You don’t look outside of yourself to blame somebody for something that is not created, you look inside yourself and make shifts.
It’s an inside job.
There are four levels of responsibility defined by many different people.
Stephen Covey talks about it, he has written some great books about leadership.
He talks about the four levels being, at the bottom level, victim, then survivor, then navigator, then creator.
I’d like to call you forth, up into really understanding and being the master creator that you are.
That’s level four.
People who are master creators, they’re self directed.
They don’t look outside of themselves for answers, they look inside.
They look inside themselves for why something didn’t go the way they wished and they shift internally, and then it shifts their external world because they understand that they are responsible for everything.
That’s level four.
I’m not always there.
Sometimes I am, but I’m not always there.
The navigator is level three, most adults live in this level.
Well, I shouldn’t say most.
A lot of adults are in this level.
They function really well in society, but they don’t believe that they’re responsible for everything.
There are still quite a number of things that they are either confused how they could be responsible for that, or they just decide that there is a whole cluster of things they’re not responsible for.
The survivor is level two.
At this level, people take responsibility, just like level three.
They take it, but they don’t believe that they are responsible.
There’s a difference between those two energies.
A survivor is somebody who is responsible, they take responsibility for their lives and begin to take proactive steps towards achieving their goals, but they still face challenges and obstacles.
They still refer back to their struggles and they want to overcome them, but they live in those struggles.
They’re a survivor.
The lowest level, which I hope you spend very little time in, is the victim.
The victim has an understanding and a belief that they are responsible for nothing that happens to them.
Everything that happens comes from the outside.
Everything unpleasant is somebody else’s or someone else’s fault, it’s not them.
And I’m telling you, this level is not a good one to have as your home base, because you give all your power away on this level.
Each level has more power, and the pinnacle is the creator.
Years ago, just to illustrate this, when I would go in to teach in my classroom, days where I would just come in at the last minute and not be organized, I would find my students in that same condition.
When I coached recently in a large-scale transformation classroom, when the coaches didn’t have their act together in the morning at the pre-meeting, we would see the very same issues showing up in our students when we got in the larger group.
It was just amazing.
One time I fell asleep, I was so exhausted in a session, and when somebody woke me up, I looked for where my students were, and one of them was all the way back in their chair with their mouth wide open and their head back.
We couldn’t awaken this student until we went into another room.
Up to that point, I would consider myself a very responsible person, but I had no clue how my actions affected others.
It was just mind blowing.
So recently I had a client who was struggling with an eating problem, a compulsive eating problem, and for the longest time I interacted with her about all the different ways that she could shift, and she didn’t.
And finally, I looked at my own behaviors.
I had been increasingly getting out of shape in the last several years for a variety of reasons, and I decided that if I wanted to support and coach effectively a student who wanted to get into a better health scenario, I needed to do it for myself as well, so I could help her shift the needle.
As I entered in and started to use this one app, I started to get really consistent with my exercise again. And as I started to drop pounds and really feel my momentum shift, for the first time, my client had the longest string of days of healthy eating that she had up to this point.
So if you don’t think the things that you do affect others, if you don’t think you have power and influence when you are standing in your full responsibility, you’re wrong.
I don’t say people are wrong often, but if you don’t understand that you’re missing the boat, when you understand that everything that you do affects everything around you, you will start to be more responsible and more powerful and more deliberate.
That’s why level four beings, they can handle the peaks and valleys of life because they are capable of taking bigger risks, and they’re capable of navigating the ups and downs that come with creating on a high level because they stand in full responsibility.
So this week, tonight, your homework is to discover what level you are in most of the time, and if you’re gutsy enough, you get to post that number in our Facebook page.
Have a beautiful night.