Responsibility Transcends Your Winning Recipe And Manages Grief

WHEN YOU WERE a young child you created a winning recipe to compensate for not being extroverted enough.  The recipe allows you to hide inside a socially acceptable way to be – approachable, dominant, intelligent, quiet, or self-sufficient. Or any of the thousands of other ways introverts act to be successful.  For example, my recipe is to be process-driven by building step by step procedures to cope with life.

The last four posts discussed how to avoid some of the dangers that your winning recipe hides. It does this because it has you focusing on it instead of the world around you.  Here we change the topic to talk about grief.

As with danger, grief is something that your winning recipe can make worse. It prevents you from addressing the issue directly.  There are solutions, but all of them lie outside of the recipe.

We commonly think of grief as involving the loss of a loved one or a dear friend, and we will deal with that in future posts.  But here we will look at a loss that does not involve another person, only yourself and something treasured that you no longer have.

Such a loss hit me when I was 37.

How I Discovered The Responsibility Solution

I HAD BEEN a part owner of a small overseas construction company for almost a decade.  It had recently failed and I was now working in Miami in a dead-end financial job.  In addition any sense of intimacy with my wife of twelve years was long gone.  The stresses of our living in Chile and Panama amid political uncertainty, chronic shortages of money, and my lack of focus on her pulled us apart.

The losses in my career and marriage provoked a deep sense of anguish.  I was a Harvard MBA, but now no longer had a bright future.  And I no longer had the life partner I thought I had joined with.  On both accounts my self-confidence was in the cellar.

I felt such grief that in 1980 when a senior guy I trusted recommended that I do a New Age program called the est Training I jumped at it.  He said it would help me see how I was making choices. That would allow me to introduce changes rather than be on automatic pilot all the time. 

I took the course and it woke me up.  It helped me see that I was being a victim. I was beating myself up over having terrible judgment in choosing a business opportunity and in choosing a woman to spend my life with.  Nor was I was being accountable for either failure; I simply blamed everything on a lack of judgment.

The solution, I came to realize, was to take responsibility for where I was in life.  The program leader said three things on that issue that struck me:

• Responsibility begins with a willingness to be cause in the matter.
• Responsibility is something you take on by declaring it.
• Once you take responsibility for a complaint it will disappear completely.

With these realizations in hand I soon turned myself around.  I took responsibility for my business judgment by quitting my dead-end job and starting to seek whatever was next for me.  It took me almost three decades to find my niche.  But the journey was invaluable, and I learned a great deal.

I took responsibility for my relationship judgment by agreeing to a divorce.  I then declared myself eager for a new relationship, and within a year and a half met the love of my life.

Unpacking The Responsibility Solution

LEARNING ABOUT RESPONSIBILITY did not expose my winning recipe as the root cause behind the business and marriage failures.  I had allowed the recipe to focus me on step by step processes to such an extreme degree that did not see it as the cause of the issues I faced.

But becoming responsible for my judgment going forward did allow me to blunt the recipe’s worst effects.  I stopped complaining.  I stopped being a victim.  And I stopped feeling sorry for myself. This allowed me to base my choices in business and love on more than step by step processes and instead be accountable for them.  The payoff in love was almost immediate; that in business took much longer but did arrive.

How To Be Accountable For Your Grief

Step 1. Identify the grief.  What loss are you grieving about?  What treasured thing short of the death of another person do you no longer have?  It may be your reputation, your dreams, a bad financial decision, a relationship, or anything else that gives you acute pain whenever you think about it.

Step 2. Ask if you are willing to take responsibility for it.  How are you being a victim over this, meaning in what way do you believe that something or someone is “doing it” to you?  That is the key step: Can you commit to stop blaming that thing or person and instead fully participate in it as a responsible party?  If so, go to Step 3. Otherwise keep thinking about the blame until you are willing to let go of it.

Step 3. Declare that you are responsible for the situation.  The amazing thing about responsibility is that it is not complicated.  All you have to do is declare, out loud to yourself and anyone you want to share it with, that you now are taking responsibility for X, whatever X is for you. 

Declarations have a short shelf life so you will slide in and out of taking responsibility. To continue being responsible you will need to keep declaring it.  The more you do it the more you will be able to act on it and escape from your complaint and your grief.

I Invite You To Take Responsibility For Your Grief Today

• What were you grieving for?  What happened when you took responsibility for it?  If you would like us to consider sharing your story anonymously with The Satisfied Introvert community please email it to me at thesatisfiedintrovert.com.
• How can I help you be responsible for your grief? Please go to the Contact page and enter your name, email, and questions. I cannot answer everyone, but will do my best – especially if the answer could benefit others.
• To be notified of new posts to The Satisfied Introvert blog, please go to the Subscribe section at the bottom of this post and enter your name and email.  Under no circumstances will we share your information without your express permission. A new post appears every two weeks.  Coming up next: “Intention Surpasses Your Winning Recipe And Copes With Grief.” If a particular post does not apply to you, future ones most likely will!

Welcome to the relief that comes from taking

responsibility for your grief, and from

eliminating the complaint that has

been keeping you stuck

as a victim

© 2022 The Satisfied Introvert LLC