Somehow I went from the courageous dreamer pursuing my dreams on the other side of the country to living back in my parent’s basement. I was humiliated and embarrassed. I felt like such a failure.

Even worse, moving in and out of my parent’s basement became a pattern that continued for too many years until I reached a point where I knew I had to break the cycle. I decided to leave and never move back in. (I had an excellent relationship with my parents. This was a decision I had to make to move forward in life.)

So naturally, I moved into my Aunt and Uncle’s guestroom. (Insert eye roll.) Literally, I moved into a guestroom down the street from my parents. As ridiculous as it was, it’s what I needed because three months later, I bought my first home.

The house itself was a total fixer-upper, which was part of the reason I could afford it. The house became a metaphor for my life. As I was fixing up the house, I was also fixing myself. (Shout out to my patient roommates who didn’t bat an eye after coming home and discovering walls were missing or floors ripped up.)

The house was a mess, and so was I.

Something happened as this house came together. Suddenly, I was responsible for something outside of myself. There was an external factor that radically started to change me internally.

A house is a big responsibility, and I was young, naive, and unprepared. I couldn’t easily walk away from it. Even if I wanted to sell the house and leave (which I wanted many times), there was work to be done. It would take time. I was responsible for the home, like it or not.

I was responsible for myself, like it or not.

Just like I got tired of working on the house, I was done trying to be a better person. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

I wanted to run away from my house, move anywhere else, and hope that I was escaping myself as well in the process. But, of course, that’s not how it works. So this house literally forced me to stay, stand my ground, and keep working on it and, in the process, keep working on myself.

There was work to be done inside of me, and I could choose to ignore it, or I could choose to accept it 100%, which is what I did. It was a choice I made. It’s a choice we all have to make.

You have to choose whether or not you will take radical responsibility for your entire existence.

For some people, this will sound too simple. For others, they’re already packing their bags and running away just at the thought. So let’s break it down.

First, you have to take radical responsibility for your external existence. This is all about how you respond to what’s happening around you: those external circumstances, both the ones that other people create and those that you create. You take responsibility for the good and the bad.

You might get stuck here, and that’s okay. It’s a lot easier to play the victim. It’s real easy to look around at all the situations, all the people around you, and in essence, remove yourself from any responsibility, assuming the role of the victim.

Victimhood is blaming other people. Victimhood is accusing other people. Victimhood is judging other people. Have you ever done those things? It is when you knowingly or many times unknowingly permit yourself to place all of your problems, pain, grief, anxiety, depression, or challenges on someone else. That is the exact opposite of responsibility. And when you choose to take radical responsibility for your entire external experience, you can’t play the victim anymore.

Whether or not you choose to accept this level of radical responsibility doesn’t affect what happens, but it will affect your quality of life. Because when you don’t choose responsibility, you’re going to spend your life fighting it. And you’re going to put all of your energy into resisting it. And you’re not going to have the energy to live a powerful life.

How do we take radical responsibility?

One of the best practices you can adopt is learning to separate the circumstance (which is what happens around you) from how you respond to it. There’s what happened and how you react to what happened.

I’ve met survivors of horrible acts done against them who have lived incredible, full, wonderful lives because they have chosen to take responsibility for how they responded to what happened to them. They’ve separated what happened with how they’re responding.

But I’ve also met survivors of horrible things who continue to experience suffering long after the actual situation happened because they never moved out of victimhood. Instead, they let that external circumstance take responsibility for everything, and in doing so, they couldn’t get past the suffering.

You can’t always change what happened, but you can change how you respond to it.

The second phase of radical responsibility is taking responsibility for your internal existence.

This is your mindset, your thoughts, the way you’re talking to yourself, your limiting beliefs, stories you’re telling yourself, and so on. That’s all part of your internal existence.

Many people don’t question what’s happening inside of their minds. They think the thoughts that they have are just the ultimate truth. So there’s zero responsibility taken for their thinking.

People are not thinking about what they’re thinking about. And a lot of times, it’s because you don’t even know it’s possible. This is not a simple concept. It’s taken me years of practice and diligence to get to a place where I can observe my thinking. And then, through that observation, I can decide if what I’m thinking is serving me or if what I’m thinking is harming me.

Begin to see yourself as the observer of your thoughts, not the thinker of your thoughts. You get to choose what you think about and how you respond and react to those thoughts. When you don’t know this, you can’t take responsibility for it, but you know it now. So now you have to choose whether or not you’re going to take responsibility for it.

Decide to take radical responsibility. Start there, and pay attention to what’s happening around you, inside of you, and how you’re responding.