The Most Important Skill In Life: Personal Ownership

Anything I write here is a theory.  It’s not immutable truth.  I’m trying to describe a skill practiced by using a set of principles that have helped me repeatedly navigate turbulent situations in my own life.  Maybe they’ll help you.  

I believe Personal Ownership is the most important skill in life.  I define Personal Ownership as taking responsibility for our Actions, Beliefs, and the overall Direction of our lives.  Our beliefs drive our actions which then influence the direction of our lives.

Why is this true?  

Change is the hardest thing we do in life.  It can be the changes we have to make in response to a goal we set, like deciding we are going to begin a regular exercise habit.  It can be changes we have to make in response to a change in our environment that is beyond our control,  like the changes we all had to make in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

When faced with the need to change we often must confront the difficulties associated with changing our own behavior.  We make mistakes.  We fail. The frustration creates the temptation to blame.  Blame allows us to offload the responsibility for change onto something or someone else.  This may relieve our immediate frustrations but it causes inaction which leads to stagnation.  The lack of progress can cause self loathing, bitterness, regret etc.  And the urge to blame others for our lack of positive change can even intensify with time.

I don’t think this is a new concept.  In fact I think it’s something that humans have been wrestling with since the beginning of recorded history probably.  Essentially, I am saying that we need to identify what we can control and control it.  The ownership of self.  Taking responsibility for yourself.  How is this not the most important task in life?  

It may seem obvious but the challenge as stated is the difficulty of change.  To change direction we have to change our behavior (actions) which probably means changing our beliefs.  Of course this depends on the magnitude of the change and the history behind it.  In the next 3 articles I’ll use my own life’s journey from a timid obese kid to a US Army Green Beret, to show you how to apply these 3 principles of ownership and what they produce.  For now, let’s look at an example I write about in my book to highlight why I describe responsibility or ownership as a skill.

To begin, let’s take a look at this picture:

The image on the far left is me in January of 2000.  It’s the beginning of my last semester in highschool.  I’m 17 years old and I weigh 305 pounds. By this point I have been working diligently for the previous 7 years, through intense exercise routines and repeated failures to change my diet.  I have also been contending with regular bullying, insults, and embarrassment by my peers for the entirety of my K-12 school experience.  That year I was able to make changes to my diet and I ended up losing 80 lbs before heading off to College at the University of Houston.  I’ll go deeper into this process in the next post.

24 years later, this is still the most cathartic transformation I have ever experienced in my life.  After 7 years of struggling and enduring the insults, ridicule, and frequent embarrassment in front of peers, I felt as though I had escaped some prison.  When I went off to college I was looking forward to having friends for the first time in my life.  Growing up, I tried my best to be social and normal at school, but outside of school I rarely hung out with anyone.  My mother often queried as to why I spent so much time alone.  I can’t remember what I would tell her.  When I was in school I didn’t have any desire to be around other people.  Many of my classmates were the source of my deepest pain so why would I want to risk exposing myself to those difficulties outside of school? 

The problem with this approach was the fact that I wasn’t developing social skills.  In particular when I got to college and friends would tease me jokingly, sometimes I would snap.  At that point in my life, I was 18 years old and jokes and teasing had always been malicious.  People laughed at me, not with me.  At least that was my interpretation.  I had sworn when I left highschool that no one would ever treat me that way again.  

I would have these huge blow ups in response to seemingly innocuous exchanges that I now recognize as normal between friends.  Rightfully so, it scared people.  I knew why I was reacting so strongly to certain situations.  They reminded me of my childhood that I thought I had escaped.  I wanted to have friends because I never had friends.  I wanted a girlfriend because I never had one.  I wanted people to understand me but I realized that unless they felt safe around me, they would never come to know my story.  To further complicate things, at that time I didn’t even realize that I had been physically and sexually abused by my sister.  I had  faint scattered memories that I had always assumed were weird dreams lingering in my subconscious.  Particularly, the memories of sexual activity with my sister made me think something was wrong with me.  Like I was a sexual deviant and I used to think that my pornography use as an adolescent was a further sign of that deviance.  It wasn’t until years later she admitted to me what she had done.  

Here I was being intensely triggered by what I now recognize as very normal experiences.  What was and still is incredibly heartbreaking for me about this time is that I knew to have some semblance of relationships I had to do something for people that no one had done for me:  I had to apologize for my behavior.  At this point in my life no one had ever attempted to apologize for the many hurtful things said and done to me (not classmates, not my sister, not my mother, no one).  After all that hurt and pain that people had caused me and never uttered a word of remorse, now I had to apologize to people.  When I had endured so much pain and cried myself to sleep so many times. And born that emotional load from all that trauma without asking for anyone’s help.  Now I have to apologize?!  At the time, this seemed cosmically and galactically unjust.  But I wanted to be understood.  To be understood, people first had to feel safe with me, physically and emotionally.  So I had to take ownership of my actions and ownership of the emotional immaturity caused by the fallout of abuse and chronic ridicule, that I didn’t ask for and did nothing to deserve.  

In my book I write:

“When I reflect upon this particular time in my life, I see how much I was holding on to my own pain.  I think we often feel that our freedom from an emotional burden is tied to someone else’s admission of guilt.  I think this sets us up to live in a perpetual state of holding grievances against someone or something… This was limiting my ability to connect with others.”

Control what you can control.  Seems so easy but our emotions can cloud our ability to be logical and self reflective.  I was blowing up.  To apologize was the logical response and my emotions could have easily stopped me from doing so.  But I wanted to move in the direction of healthy relationships.  I wanted to be free from my past.  This means I had to reevaluate my belief that I had somehow left my childhood behind. Also, I had to let go of the belief that anyone would ever apologize to me for the many wrongs I endured.  Then, out of a desire to change, I had to take action and apologize, often.  I had to work hard to understand my behavior and it’s taken years of work.  Making these changes allowed me to have relationships with others for the first time in my life.  However, I had and still have a lot to work on.  My emotional baggage has destroyed several important relationships in the last 24 years.  I am remorseful for the harm I’ve caused and all I can do is keep working to get better.  Control what you can control.  

Again, these 3 things:  Actions, Beliefs, and Direction.  Personal Ownership is taking responsibility for these three things at all times.  This is the most important skill in life because our emotions can convince us of the truth of lies while blinding us to our own responsibility to change.  It’s not just negative emotions either.  Sometimes we can use positive emotions to convince ourselves of a fairy tale that masks the reality of life.  Am I saying our emotions are invalid or should be ignored?  Hell no!  But we have to be skillful in seeing through them or we will be guided by them as opposed to being guided by the truth.  

The 3 principles I lay out in the next 3 articles will correlate to our:

• Actions – Action Over Time – If it’s worth having, it’s worth fighting for…
• Beliefs – Understand Your Story – Our actions come from our beliefs even when we don’t know what we believe in…
• Direction – Maintain A Vision – The process is more important than the products…

I believe the ability to clearly see through our emotions, frustrations, anger, rage, lusts, desires, highs, and lows… to see through these things and observe with objectivity the truth as best we can understand it… to see what we can control and control it… This seems simple but it is a skill and in the following articles I’ll show you how to apply these skills and what they produce.  

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