Committing to being radically self-responsible has done more to change the way I think about my life than anything else I have tried. It has liberated me because the fact that I can not blame anyone or anything for my life helped me to finally see that it is all up to me… it gave me permission to really start to design and craft the life that I want. And I want to spread the idea of radical self-responsibility to people like me who are struggling to understand why they aren’t making any progress in creating the life they want, people who have tried “everything” and are still stuck.
I am a recent convert to living a life of radical self-responsibility. Up until a few years ago I was blaming everyone and everything I could for the fact that I was not living the life I wanted. (To be clear, I am still not living my dream life but I am getting closer to it everyday.) Radical self-responsibility is not an easy thing to commit to because it required me to own everything that happens in my life… EVERYTHING…. as my doing, my creation.
I have always despised people who played the victim. They seemed weak and pathetic to me. But then, to my horror, I realized I had been playing the victim my entire life. I was the thing I despised. That messed with my head just a bit.
Being a victim makes it really easy to blame everyone and everything but yourself for how much your life sucks.
On the surface my life looked okay. I was surrounded by people who loved me, I had a career and I had enough clean underwear to get through an entire week. I had everything I thought I wanted.
And yet I was vaguely unhappy. I say vaguely because I didn’t know what was wrong BUT I could tell you who’s fault it was… my husband’s or my mom’s or my childhood or the land lord who wouldn’t rent to me when I was 22 or the fact that I didn’t have my own car until I was 28.
I was SUCH a victim.
Somehow, I found a path through the fog of victimhood and lack of self-responsibility. Finding that path was a crap shoot, I marvel at how I made it to where I am today considering I had a big problem with asking for help or support or hearing the truth.
Find a path I did. This path has had starts and stops and right turns and left turns but it was and is a path, which led to another path and another path and on and on. A truly magical moment came when the path led to this idea of Radical Self-Responsibility ( I didn’t know it was magical at the time). Radical Self-Responsibility was a way out of victimhood for me.
I am not perfect. Sometimes I get it right and sometimes I get it spectacularly wrong. I don’t have it all figured out and I don’t expect you to either.
Radical Self-Responsibility is not about perfection. It’s about getting to your vulnerable truth.
That is what being a BadAss is all about… getting to your vulnerable truth and it is usually pretty messy.
I had to deconstruct my idea of spiritual perfection to find my inner BadAss and get to my REAL life. Most of the time my REAL life doesn’t look anything like an InstaGram post. I rarely, if ever, find myself sitting peacefully on a beach, meditating as unicorns farting rainbows cavort around me. My life is blurry, rumpled and comfortable. I am happy, I am sad , I am joyful and I am despondent, sometimes all in the span of 5 minutes, it’s how I roll. I try to feel all those feelings. I try to let them process through me. I cry when the feeling to cry comes on. I sit and seethe in my anger until it passes. I soak in joy when it washes over me. I try not to run away from anything these days…. unless its a mountain lion. I stumble and fall but I get up a lot faster than I used to. I keep on working to be the most authentic version of me possible and it is totally worth it.
What makes me a BadAss coach?
First of all I am a BadAss coach because I say I am… I came up with the idea. As a BadAss coach I facilitate my client’s journey to radical self-responsibility and letting their inner BadAss come forward in order to start creating the life they want. Becoming radically self-responsible is not easy and it doesn’t happen over night. You have to start to manage your mind and most of us have minds that are flabby and out of shape from being on auto-pilot. Training yourself to manage your mind takes time and effort, just like getting in shape to run a marathon takes time and effort. And training for anything works better when you have someone helping and supporting you through it and that someone is me.
