Possibly about ten years ago, I was sitting across from my uncle Paul, who has always been something of a North Star in my world. Amongst many things (confidant, therapist, and fellow comrade in the art of ridiculous behaviour), he has been an ever present source of wisdom and guidance over the years. He’s one of those people who, if I find myself disagreeing with him, my first instinct is to look inward and assume I’m probably the one who’s missed something. And, by the way, if you don’t have someone like that in your life, it’s worth finding one.
Anyhow, I think we were on a train to London, though I might be blending together a few different trips. Memory does that, smoothing things into something more coherent than they probably were. But I do remember sitting opposite him at one of those small tables that you get on UK trains, and I’m fairly sure we had cans of gin and tonic on the go - a marginally thuggish little ritual we tend to fall into when we’re heading to some event we’re really looking forward to.
As the countryside blurred past, he started telling me about a book he’d been reading, The Success Principles by Jack Canfield. He said it had been making a real difference to how he was thinking about things. Then he gave me the first principle.
You must be willing to take 100% responsibility for everything in your life.
I didn’t like it. It wasn’t even mild hesitation. More of an instinctive recoil. Eww! The kind where you immediately start assembling counterexamples in your head like a snotty plum-faced lawyer preparing for trial. What about people who are assaulted? What about domestic violence? What about children who are abused? What about structural inequality, illness, bereavement?
It sounded, at first pass, like the sort of thing that sneaks menacingly into neoliberal discourse and market-driven policy. Whatever has happened to you, fix it yourself. Then get back to work, you bad little machine. No excuses. I said as much, and he would have been characteristically too patient and too composed to roll his eyes. Indeed, he didn’t double down on the offending motto. He clarified it.
No, no, no - you are not responsible for everything that people do to you, or the external things that are projected upon you. But you must be willing to be responsible for what you do next. You are responsible for your life, once you accept the will you have over it. That took the edge off it. But it was probably a few more years, and many more hours in the therapy room, until the idea started to morph into something I could assimilate into my personal philosophy (how pretentious) and work.
There is a version of this idea that is crude and harmful. The version that blames people for their own suffering, or ignores context, or pretends that everyone starts from the same place. That version deserves to be rejected. But there is another version, a more nuanced one, that is not about the allocation of fault or blame at all. It is about what happens after the event. After the thing you didn’t choose. After the traumatic experience, the betrayal, the loss, or merely the everyday disappointment.
At some point, whether we like it or not, we are left holding whatever remains, and it is here that we have the opportunity to take responsibility. Not responsibility as fault, or as moral virtue full of pressure and obligation. Responsibility as ownership.
In therapy, this comes up in almost every ‘case’ (I don’t like that term, but I don’t have another one right now). Someone sits down and begins to describe, very understandably, that what has happened to them is unfair. That they didn’t deserve it. That it shouldn’t have happened. Almost always true.
But if the conversation stays there, things get stuck, and therapy quickly becomes a holding pen for the expression of injustice, rather than a stepping stone to a more desired future. The client’s life becomes organised around the minutia of unfairness. Their internal narrative becomes fixed around grievance, and their future shrinks.
The person is no longer dealing with what happened. They are bound to it.
This is a trap. It keeps you fixed on what is right and who has been wronged, rather than on what is possible and desirable now, and going forward. When everything is framed through what was done to you, your capacity to move is handed over to that event, or to the person who caused it. They become, in a strange way, the author of what comes next. And waiting for an apology, or for the scales of justice to balance, which depends on permission from the source of the pain, is like asking your captor for the keys to a gate that was never locked.
Responsibility interrupts that.
It sounds harsh until you realise what it actually offers. It says: this is yours now. Not because you caused it. But because you are the only one who can do anything with it.
There is something deeply existential about this.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that we are “condemned to be free.” We are always, whether we want to be or not, in the position of having to choose. We live in the constant shadow of this mandate. So much so that even not choosing is a choice.
Even staying where you are is a way of using your freedom.
This is where people often resist. Because if you accept that you are responsible for what comes next, you also have to accept that you are not entirely trapped. And that is uncomfortable. It removes the last defence that says, “there’s nothing I can do.”
There is always something you can do.
Taking responsibility, in this sense, requires acceptance. Acceptance doesn’t mean you have to like it, agree with it, or endorse it. It just means recognising that it has happened, and that wishing it hadn’t does not change the fact that it did.
From there, the imperative shifts.
From “why did this happen to me?” and “who / what is to blame?”
To “what is this teaching me?” and “what do I do now?”
The former questions keep us trapped in grievance. The latter liberate us into action.
None of this necessitates dramatic reinvention. More often it is about pursuing small, incremental ‘towards moves’. Booking an initial conversation with a therapist. Committing to a mindfulness app. Putting your phone away for a few hours to step out of the churn. People assume change arrives through sudden and dramatic actions or whole contextual shifts. It rarely does. It builds incrementally. One move creates the conditions for the next. Momentum is something you generate, not wait for. Externally, this is all quite drab and ordinary. Internally, it’s the difference between being stuck and starting to move.
I am still cautious about how easily this idea can be misused. It can be weaponised - turned into a way of dismissing real suffering or ignoring structural constraints. It can become a slogan that shuts people down rather than opens anything up. That is not what this is.
This is not about telling people to get on with it. It is about returning something that is often lost in the aftermath of difficult experiences. A sense of agency. A sense that, despite everything, there is still a direction available. That your life is not over because something happened. That you are not finished. Hell no!
If you take this seriously, it becomes less about agreeing with a quote in a self-help book, and more about asking yourself some uncomfortable but necessary questions:
Where in your life are you waiting for something external to change before you allow yourself to move?
What are you still organising your life around that has already happened?
Where are you telling yourself there is nothing you can do, when in reality there might be something small you are avoiding?
What would taking responsibility look like this week, not in theory, but in behaviour?
If you accepted, fully, the situation you are in right now, what would the next step be?
If you took that step, what might open up that currently feels closed?
Taking 100% responsibility is not about accepting fault or blame for everything that has happened to you. It is about refusing to give away control over what happens next.
