Summary & notes from “The Responsibility Process: Unlocking Your Natural Ability to Live and Lead with Power”

“The Responsibility Process offers powerful coaching. Christopher doesn’t just define the problem and then leave you with it the way some books do. He provides abundant tools, practices, and wisdom for taking ownership, solving problems, and developing your consciousness as a leader. I know you will enjoy this book and live a better life for having read it.”
— HENRY KIMSEY-HOUSE, co-founder & lead designer of CTI, co-author of Co-Active Coaching & Co-Active Leadership

After attending a training by Christopher Avery, I’d been delving deeper into The Responsibility Process and made a lot of notes from his seminal book on Responsibility titled “The Responsibility Process: Unlocking Your Natural Ability to Live and Lead with Power”. I, seriously, advise and recommend the reader to buy his book and enroll in any of his training program @ www.responsibility.com.

Here are my notes and summary of the book, hope you, the reader, like it.

The Responsibility Process: Summary

Chapter 1: What Is Personal Responsibility?

When we look at responsibility throughout history, a central theme emerges — free will versus determinism and our perceptions of cause and effect. The never-ending debate around determinism and free will reveals that for each of us taking or avoiding personal responsibility is an ongoing test of what we believe about people in general and about ourselves in particular.

Control the Sail, Not the Wind

We can trace this sailing metaphor back nearly two millennia to the first century Greek-speaking Stoic philosopher Epictetus who is widely quoted as saying, “It’s not what happens to you but how you react to it that matters.” Responsibility, therefore, is the ability to respond, response-ability. We may not always be in charge of what happens to us, but we can always choose our response.

Perceptions of Cause and Effect

In Homer’s Odyssey, book 1, Zeus, in speaking to the other gods, says: “See now, how men lay blame upon us gods for what is after all nothing but their own folly.” We can make two observations here. First, when we talk about who is responsible for something, we are usually inferring cause and effect. Second, responsibility is a popular topic of conversation when things go wrong. When things are going well, we seldom ask, “Who did this to me?” But when things go wrong, our minds seek desperately to assign cause. Psychology has a name for this: attribution.

Attribution is the mental perception of cause and effect. That means we attribute a certain effect (like unhappiness at work) to a certain cause (like a surly boss). But if you look more deeply and clearly, you will realize that most often, your perception of a person or a situation is all in your head.

Responsible people develop a keen awareness of their attributions. Why? They realize they can take greater ownership of life, work, and relationships by being aware of, examining, and continuously improving their own attributions of cause and effect.

It’s How I Respond That Counts

Efficacy is the power to produce an effect. In a person, efficacy is usually called competence, or the ability to produce a result. Self-efficacy is the degree to which we believe we are competent. Everyone has things they want to do, habits or situations they want to change, and goals they want to accomplish. But desire and effective action aren’t the same thing. American Psychologist Albert Bandura’s research shows that our self-efficacy strongly affects how we approach our tasks, goals, challenges, and problems.

If you have high self-efficacy, you:

a. “see challenges as opportunities to gain new mastery,”

b. “engage more deeply in activities,” and

c. “bounce back more rapidly from setbacks.”

If you have low self-efficacy, you:

a. “avoid challenges,”

b. “emphasize your personal failings,” and

c. “have little confidence in your abilities.”

The good news is that self-efficacy can be developed. There are four major sources according to Bandura:

Mastery experiences

The experience of mastering something is the most important factor determining self-efficacy. Failure experiences lower self-efficacy, and success experiences raise self-efficacy.

Social modeling

Self-efficacy can also be developed vicariously by seeing another’s success. We think to ourselves, ‘If they can do it, I can.’

Social persuasion

Encouragement and discouragement affect self-efficacy. Bandura’s research says that encouragement is not as effective at raising another’s self-efficacy as discouragement is at lowering it. Wow! Pay attention. Positivity and productivity are related.

Physiological and psychological responses

Our mental and physical states impact how much we believe in our ability to perform. Note, it is not the emotional and physical reactions themselves but our attributions about them that raise or lower our self-efficacy.

Bandura and other psychologists also write about “personal agency.” That means to be an agent in your own life to make plans, put them into action, and produce outcomes. So, take responsibility for being a survivor rather than a victim. Take ownership.

Chapter 2: Responsibility ≠ Accountability

Not only do we use responsibility and accountability interchangeably, but we also use both words to mean many things. We use both words for the following meanings:

1. Feelings of ownership, or lack thereof, for one’s experience and associated willingness and ability to take effective action;

2. The act of making, keeping, and managing performance agreements and expectations.

Responsibility is the feeling of ownership. And accountability refers to making, keeping, and managing agreements and expectations. Here’s a fun way to remember this: If you report to a boss and you’re not clear about what you will be held accountable for, then you might want to take responsibility for finding out. Responsibility means the ability to respond. It implies owning your power and ability to choose your response. While accountability is other oriented, and focused on what happened in the Past, responsibility is self-oriented, and focused on the present.

Accountability Is Imprecise

Accountability is outside or external to you. So whether or not you are held accountable isn’t up to you. It’s up to others. Here’s a test: Have you ever been held to account for something you don’t think you should have been? And have there been times you haven’t been held accountable for a positive action or result of which you were proud? If this sounds a bit odd, then it reinforces a common belief that being held to account is only a negative experience of laying blame because it is in response to a perceived failure to meet expectations. Thus, accountability is vague.

Responsibility Always Trumps Accountability

At work, if a person’s ability to respond is poorly matched for his or her assignment (i.e., accountabilities), then the work will suffer. And, if the environment penalizes people for actually taking responsibility — for thinking for themselves, and being proactive in solving the real problem instead of doing as they are told — then even good, smart, caring people will avoid taking responsibility, and the work will suffer.

Managing accountability is the systemic stuff of management. In larger systems, it is likely necessary to some degree but not sufficient. Creating a culture of responsibility is the stuff of leadership.

To practice responsibility, think of a time someone influenced you to want to step up and take personal responsibility for something.

· How did it happen?

· What was it that drove your desire to take responsibility?

· Does this particular situation lend itself more toward a performance review system or an informal chat with those who inspired you?

· Have you ever been that influential leader inspiring someone else?

Think back and reflect on how that happened.

Invite and Attract Responsibility

To encourage, enable, and support the taking of personal responsibility in others, first realize that personal responsibility and thus self-leadership are innate in every human being. Responsibility

can be systematically observed, taught, learned, practiced, and supported.

To encourage responsibility in others,

· we can grant them maximum autonomy so that they can take responsibility;

· allow them to make mistakes, self-correct, and learn instead of preventing their failure or rescuing them; and

· stop saving them from challenging trials so that they can experience natural consequences that allow for reflection and learning.

Chapter 3: The Responsibility Process

You are dressed in your finest business suit for your big presentation to the board. And then you bump somebody in the hall and, as you are taking a sip of your latte, the paper cup slams into your face. Then with the accusing look on your face, you turn to glare at the chump who bumped into you. That’s how problems trigger The Responsibility Process.

Here’s a fuller explanation of what happened. You were in motion toward a goal. Then something unanticipated happened that blocked your motion. At that moment, there is a significant conflict in your mind between what you want, and what you have. This internal conflict — between what you want and what you have — is the source of anxiety. This is the trigger for The Responsibility Process.

Here is the pattern your mind follows in order when your Responsibility Process is triggered: Denial, Lay Blame, Justify, Shame, Obligation, Quit. In these mental states, we cope with problems by complaining or obsess internally, but we never solve them from these mental positions. Beyond these states, we grow to overcome problems.

The Cause-and-Effect Logic of Each Mental State

Our first thought when we experience something wrong (the effect) is what caused this problem? And then our mind immediately looks for the triggers (the causes) that possibly threw us in our upsets.

Lay Blame

The moment something goes wrong, our mind begins a hyperactive search for cause and effect. The first place the mind visits is the mental state of Lay Blame.

When we’re in the mental state of Lay Blame, we tell ourselves that we are powerless victims, and someone else is to be blamed for our problem. We occupy the position of effect, and the object of our blame occupies the position of cause. In the cause-effect equation then, the cause is external. Problem solving from this mental state and its logic can only find one solution — that person must change for our problem to go away.

Make a conscious choice to reject it. The lesson then is to pay attention to our own thoughts, language, and behaviors when we are upset or frustrated. Every upset is an opportunity to learn.

Justify

Justify is a little different from Lay Blame. In Justify we blame circumstances instead of people. We tell ourselves stories that justify why we have the problem. Here are a few examples of what Justify can sound like in an organization:

· “We’re stuck with outdated technology.”

· “Our processes are overly bureaucratic.”

In Justify, we see ourselves in the position of effect — i.e., the problem is happening to us. And we see the circumstances — e.g., the weather, traffic, economy, or business culture — in the position of cause. This leaves only one premise — that for our problem to go away, the circumstances must change. But we can’t wait for the world to change for us.

To escape Justify mindset, we want to become vitally aware of the stories we are telling ourselves. We must recognize that we’re positioning ourselves as powerless. When we realize this, we usually choose to stop justifying for that problem.

Shame

Shame occurs when we stop externalizing our problem. Our focus turns inward. So in Shame, we’re simply Laying Blame on self. In Shame you see yourself in both positions of cause and effect — but not in a healthy and resourceful way. You think I did this to me. Ugh. Listen to the language of Shame:

· “I’m such a dummy.”

· “I’m not skilled enough.”

· “I didn’t try hard enough.”

The premise in Shame is that we lack what we need. So, how can we get out of Shame?

First, we want to notice that we are blaming ourselves. Then, we make a new choice. We choose to stop laying blame on ourselves. Ask yourself the question: How long do you deserve to beat yourself up for being human? Or a variation: How long do you want to hang out in Shame?

Additionally, you can remind yourself that you won’t solve the problem from that mental state. You will only cope. So the sooner you get off of Shame the better.

Obligation

Obligation is the mental state of feeling trapped or burdened in your life, work, or relationships. In Obligation, you are sure you have no choice, you have to:

· do something you don’t want to do,

· be somebody you don’t want to be, or

· have something you don’t want to have.

Obligation is the mental state of “have to, but don’t want to.” This conflict produces stress and anxiety. It prevents us from taking true ownership and experiencing Responsibility.

There are two huge and obvious costs or taxes when people operate from Obligation.

1. First, in Obligation our performance is barely adequate to get a pass.

2. The second outrageous cost of the Obligation mindset is resentment. Resentment is a mental virus that grows as you cope with having what you don’t want. It sucks mental energy, directs your angst toward the things that you believe have you trapped — family, work, boss, career, mortgage, etc., and prevents you from perceiving cause and effect clearly.

The exit from Obligation is refusing to feel trapped. The more aware you become of your perceptions of cause and effect, the more you’ll be able to help yourself.

Responsibility

Responsibility is a mental state that is open, spacious, free, and safe. You trust that you have sufficient intelligence, creativity, and resources to face whatever life brings. Responsibility is owning your power and ability to create, choose, and attract your reality.

Choose. We have the power and ability to know and express our wants and desires through preferences and through identifying options or choices. For example, if you want to experience excellent mental and physical health, you will choose a healthy diet, exercise, and sleep patterns.

Create. Create means to cause to come into being. Creating is a little more complex and less linear than a choice. It involves multiple choices over time. When we deliberately create a positive experience, it involves envisioning the end result to some degree, planning a series of choices, then experimenting and reflecting to arrive at the desired experience.

Attract. Attract means to draw to you either by a physical force such as gravity or magnetism, by appealing to the emotions or senses, or by spiritual or mystical means. The Responsibility Process teaches us that we are far more powerful and able than we usually give ourselves credit for. What we attract is in our control.

Quit

In Quit, you think you have parked the problem, but it’s just on temporary hold. It will return. And it is costing you mental and emotional energy. In Quit, we aren’t authentic, present, or speaking our truth. Here are some phrases that illustrate Quit:

· “Someday I’ll deal with that, but not now.”

· “Whatever!”

To escape the mental state of Quit, confront it directly and with compassion. You call yourself out gently for being in Quit. You ask yourself, ‘What new truth or insight must I get so that I can know what I really want and have it?’ When you do this, your mind works with you to move you into Responsibility where you can think more clearly and resourcefully — and the possibilities start to flow.

What About Denial?

Denial is an invisible or assumed part of The Responsibility Process. Denial is far easier to spot in others than in ourselves. But it is one of the top five reasons senior executives fail. Why? Because they just didn’t see it coming. So what can you do about Denial?

First, be willing to completely accept the consequences of ignorance. Consciously choose your purpose, direction, and source of fulfillment in life so your work will be play and your discoveries and accomplishments will make you deliriously happy. Then if something comes out of the blue and turns out to be a problem, so be it. Accept it as a consequence of your choices. That’s what Responsibility is — the willingness to have the consequences of your choices.

Chapter 4: The Three Keys to Responsibility

Now that you know there is a predictable pattern in your mind — The Responsibility Process — processing your thoughts about taking or avoiding Responsibility, you may be wondering What do I do about it!? That’s where the Three Keys to Responsibility come in. These three keys unlock and provide you with access to The Responsibility Process:

Key 1: The Intention to Operate from Responsibility

The first key to Responsibility is Intention to operate from the mental state of Responsibility when things go wrong. It is an intention to be resourceful and to lead yourself to freedom, choice, and power. Start by identifying a frustration or upset you are experiencing and then commit to resolve it and give yourself newfound freedom, choice, and power.

Key 2: Awareness of Your Mental State

The first key Intention calls us to “intend to operate from Responsibility.” It doesn’t call us to “always stay in Responsibility.” Awareness calls us to notice our mental state when we are upset so that we can make a conscious choice about whether we operate from that mental state.

The specific practice is this: Notice — develop the Awareness of — where you are in The Responsibility Process when you are frustrated or upset. Learn to ask yourself, ‘Where am I in The Responsibility Process?’ Then check whether you are in Lay Blame, Justify, Shame, Obligation, or Quit. And act accordingly.

Key 3: Confront Your Internal Conflict

When you practice Confront, you choose to fully experience your anxiety while examining, observing, and searching your thoughts for what’s true that you’re not seeing. When you gain experience doing this, you realize that the same anxiety that causes us to get stuck in coping states can be put to use to provoke our mind in Responsibility to uncover the false expectation or assumption that we could not previously see.

So, ask yourself what assumption you might be holding on to that isn’t necessarily true. Or you could ask yourself what insightful bit of truth or clarity you aren’t yet seeing that could give you a new perspective and allow you to generate new and truly freeing choices about how to respond.

Honing Your Intention — The Winning Key

When you consciously set intentions and meet them, you feel like you are winning. Two primary approaches exist to develop your Intention. Intending to operate from Responsibility is the first. The second is actively discovering what you truly want in your life, believing it can be so, aligning to it, and noticing and claiming the win when intentions come true.

Honing Your Awareness — The Change Key

Awareness is the change key because as we become aware of facts and our own thoughts, we are able to change in the direction of our desires. Without new Awareness, we may not know that change is available or possible.

Myriad approaches exist for expanding your consciousness for greater Awareness: Meditation, breath work, personality assessments, martial arts, psychoanalysis, 360-degree feedback, journaling, leadership development, the arts, and so many more. All of these can be used to introduce you to new understandings about yourself and others.

Honing Your Confront — The Growth Key

Confront is the growth key because only when we Confront the real problem can we solve it.

The best way is to feel yourself getting upset about something and at that moment make a conscious choice to remain present and centered while examining the upset in your mind to determine what’s true about the conflict between what you have and what you want.

Chapter 5: The Catch Sooner Game

Have you tried, failed, and given up on changing one or more of your habitual thought patterns or behaviors? If so, you would not be alone. The Catch Sooner Game can help you change with four-step adaptive process:

Catch

Let’s say you want to improve your listening skills in a meeting, and specifically, you have a habit of interrupting others that you want to break. You know that as a leader, when you interrupt others you send subtle cues that you value your voice more than you value their voice. In the Catch Sooner game, your first Intention is to catch yourself sooner and doing whatever it is you want to change, in this case, catching yourself in the process of interrupting someone. Once you are able to catch the thought while it is still an impulse instead of an action, then your outward behavior has changed. At that point you still have the impulse, so you will want to continue catching yourself earlier.

Change

The second step is to change from the former behavior to the new behavior. So in the case of interrupting, you might switch to listening. You may even say to the other person, “Excuse me, I caught myself interrupting you when I really want to be listening. I apologize. Please continue.” The moment you catch yourself, stop the thought or behavior that you do not want.

Forgive

After you catch yourself and change that incident, immediately forgive yourself. Let it go. Why? The sooner you accept that you are human and full of unconscious programming, the faster you will change. Forgiveness is a powerful force for change. Smile compassionately at allowing your old programming to show up. This is a much faster way to change than to punish yourself.

Vow

In the Catch Sooner Game, the promise, or vow, that you make to yourself is to catch yourself sooner the next time you trigger the habit you want to change.

With each round of Catch Sooner, you become more and more aware of your impulses, your cognitions, your assumptions, beliefs, values, etc. And with each round of Catch Sooner, you

Confront all your mental programming and invite yourself to be more present the next time so that you can catch it earlier.

The Daily Scorecard Game

Here is a specific application of Catch Sooner that can support you in rapidly altering your mindset:

1. To create the scorecard, choose the one mental state that you want to track today. Let’s say it is Lay Blame. Write Lay Blame” at the top of the card. Then divide the card into two columns. Label the left column “Caught it.” Label the right column “It got out.”

2. When you catch yourself having a thought of Lay Blame and you get off of it before operating from that mental position, give yourself a score in the left column. If the thought turns into action before you catch it give yourself a mark for a score in the right column. Do this all day long.

3. At the end of the day, count up all the marks in the left “Caught it” column and multiply the original number by ten. Then count up all the marks in the right “It got out” column and multiply the original number by one. Add the two columns points. Some people get confused about why you would get any points at all for laying blame on others. Your points are not for laying blame, but for the Awareness that you did.

4. To continue the game, the next day choose another of the mental states, then repeat all the steps of the game. Do a different mental state each day for a week.

Chapter 6: Lead Yourself First

Our ability to lead others in Responsibility depends entirely on how effectively we have integrated the practice of Responsibility into our own life.

The Responsibility Process Works Only When Self-Applied

Most people, when introduced to The Responsibility Process, start applying it to others in their life and focusing on how others should change. They ask questions like “How can I get my spouse to stop blaming?” The Responsibility Process is a tool for self-leadership. Applying it to other people will never solve the real problem or bring you increased abilities or freedoms. Only self-applying will increase your degrees of freedom, choice, and power.

“What Do I Want?” Not “What Should I Do?”

We’ve been taught that no matter what problem you have someone has already solved it. You just have to be responsible enough to find it. We’ve followed all of those shoulds and should-nots right into lives of being responsible with lots of unresolved problems. Maybe it is time for a new question. “What do I want?” invites you to think for yourself, own your role in the situation, and see your path to a satisfying solution. Here is an exercise you can use to uncover what is most important in your life so that you can increasingly align yourself to it.

Step 1 — Discovery

Begin by writing an exhaustive list of responses to this first question. Do not edit while you go. Do not judge your ideas. This is an exercise in quantity, not quality. Just write response after response until you feel complete. Here’s the question:

What do you want to experience in your life in abundance on a daily basis?

Step 2 — Organizing

Once you have an exhaustive list you may want to do a little editing or combining of a few of the phrases that are repeats. Your goal here is to keep your items focused on specific daily experiences.

Step 3 — Ordering

Now it is time to discover whether some of the statements are more important to you than others. This helps you focus, prioritize, and simplify your choices. Here is how to do it. Ask yourself this question:

If I could only experience one of these things in abundance on a daily basis, which would it be?

Craft Better Goals

Another way to relearn how to want is to examine your goals from a new perspective of Responsibility. The purpose of a true goal is to keep you in motion, pulling you toward the goal.

But many people’s supposed goals don’t put them in motion for some reason. That’s because the so-called goals aren’t really goals. They are shoulds. If you want to achieve your goals, then start with what Bill McCarley, the father of The Responsibility Process research calls “Good Goals.”

According to McCarley, a good goal has the following characteristics:

· Clarify Intention. The clearer you are about what you want and intend to accomplish, the better.

· Focus Attention. If you want to make sure something happens you must focus attention on it.

· Remove Obligation. Too many goals become a burden because people feel like they have to do them. Procrastination comes from Obligation.

· Generate Energy. Good goals lead to excitement, motivation, and a deep desire to do it!

Focus On the Essential

In his best-selling book The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less, successful management consultant and entrepreneur Richard Koch claims that the one true principle of highly effective people and organizations is that 80 percent of results flow from just 20 percent of the causes. Applied to life happiness and success, it implies that we can achieve more by focusing on less. So, how can you do that?

Here are the steps:

Step 1. Identify all your commitments

Make a list of every commitment, promise, initiative, project, goal, and objective in every area of your life. It can be a commitment to yourself or to another. Just write it down.

Step 2. Sort your commitments into three columns

The three columns are No, Yes, and Hell Yes. Since each is something you are already doing, you won’t have anything in the No column at first. When applying The Responsibility Process, Hell Yes items represent true wants and demands. Yes items are probably shoulds, bad goals, etc. If this step generates new Awareness and Confront, then the exercise is working as it should.

Step 3. Empty the Yes column

That’s right. Eliminate halfhearted commitments. Make everything in your life either a No or a Hell Yes.

Chapter 7: Sharing Responsibility, Sharing Leadership

Do you share responsibility with others for things that are larger than each of you and also depend on the care, investment, and responsiveness of all? Of course you do. When such

situations go well, it is a joy to be a part of them. Valuable outcomes are achieved. Strong bonds and memories are made. But when such situations don’t go well, it is terribly frustrating. Results are not achieved. Relationships decay and break. Responsibility is avoided.

Being effective in shared-responsibility situations calls on your Intention to build and align relationships around a specific larger purpose. It demands your Awareness of how groups naturally step up to the opportunity presented by shared responsibility and how they don’t. And it calls for you to Confront your own Responsibility for the success or failure of the larger whole.

The Main Dynamics: Alignment and Integration

Alignment and integration are the most important dynamics to attend to in shared-responsibility situations. Alignment refers to the directional focus of people’s efforts. If people in a shared-responsibility situation are not aligned, there will be frustration.

The other main dynamic at work in shared-responsibility situations is integration — the degree to which members operate with shared values, principles, and beliefs that support the whole. Some would call this trust, transparency, integrity, or even relationship. It is all of those. It is also participation and inclusion, honoring differences, fairness, caring equally for all members, protecting other people’s boundaries, and never being the first to defect on the group.

To provide leadership in shared-responsibility situations, you will focus on achieving and maintaining alignment and integration.

You Are a Trim Tab

So many people assume they can’t make much of a difference in groups unless they are given authority over others in the group. However, in group settings, these same individuals admit seeing either a positive or negative difference that others make. We can perceive how a group that we are in might be different with or without each other member. However, we either can’t or don’t perceive how that group would be different without us.

A useful metaphor here is the trim tab. A trim tab is a small lever on the outer edge of a larger lever such as a ship’s rudder which lets the pilot turn the huge rudder into the flow with much less effort. In every shared-responsibility situation, you are a trim tab whether you know it or not. There are many small things you can do that move the dynamics toward a positive shared-responsibility situation.

Shared Responsibility Is Shared Leadership

When people in a shared-responsibility situation step up to high levels of ownership, you also see high levels of shared leadership. People take turns leading and following each other in different aspects of the initiative. In this case, leadership is not about title, assignment, control, or ego. Instead it is about service and contribution.

An emerging area of leadership research calls this “distributed leadership.” Distributive leadership is unique in that it does not describe qualities or characteristics of the individual. Instead it describes a quality of the system where leadership is distributed among the members of

the system. This supports the notion that leadership is a by-product of stepping up to Responsibility.

Your Greatest Source of Power

Most people are unaware of their greatest source of power. You may be surprised to learn that

there are only three sources of power:

Authority power: Authority is “power over” someone. It is also classified as “threat” power;

Exchange power: Exchange power is “power to” or “power by someone. It is also known as bargaining power;

Integrative power: Integrative power is “power with” someone. It is described as your ability to attract others to you using only your ideas and actions to accomplish something greater than you could do alone.

Your total power is determined by how you combine and use, or misuse, these three sources. But of the three sources of power, authority and exchange powers are celebrated and sought after in our society, but integrated power goes virtually unrecognized even though the first two of the power sources are limited because their value depends on scarcity. Only your integrative power is unlimited and is the source of sustainable abundance; although, you may choose to limit it.

Set Up Positive Interdependence

The single greatest lever for transforming any group into a team is the feeling that “we are in the same boat together.” To take a stand for positive interdependence, ask the others who share responsibility with you, “What is our shared outcome (or purpose or goal)?”

Here is a more specific question you can ask:

What must we do together that:

· is larger than any of us,

· requires all of us, and

· none of us can claim as an individual victory until it is done?

Keep the question in front of the group until you are all looking at each other, nodding your heads in agreement, and smiling about the singular answer you share and understand. Then take the win. It is a tremendous source of leverage.

Addressing Problems Between

Most people agree that the biggest problems are not within roles but between roles, not within teams but between teams, not within departments but between departments, and not within organizations but between organizations. “Problems between” are not assigned to anyone.

Why? Because they are between. Most importantly, problems between will remain unresolved until someone chooses to own the problem.

Many problems between will require you to recruit others to help you — such as other people on your team, colleagues in other departments, or even sometimes people outside your organization who share responsibility for the problem.

If you find yourself in a workplace with lots of problems between that no one is owning, you can add a lot of value by expanding your sense of responsibility well beyond your role. Look for potential partners on the other side of a problem between that, if solved, would add tremendous value to the organization.

Chapter 8: Developing Responsibility in Others

Your ability to teach, coach, and mentor others is governed by your own level of practice. And, your own practice is accelerated when you challenge yourself to teach, coach, and mentor others.

So if you want to support others in developing Responsibility, you will want to commit to lifetime mastery, and if you want to accelerate your mastery, you need to commit four quadrants of lifetime mastery:

Study The Responsibility Process

The first step to becoming an effective teacher or mentor of Responsibility is committing to study The Responsibility Process and related models — not just book study, but study in application.

Demonstrate Responsibility

The second step to lifetime mastery — and thus to teaching or coaching — is to demonstrate Responsibility yourself. Talking about “being responsible” and telling others they should take

responsibility is for people on a soapbox who want to incite others to do something they themselves aren’t doing. Leave the talk to them. Demonstrating Responsibility inspires and enlightens others in ways that simply talking never will.

What if you find yourself in a situation where someone is challenging your authority and what you teach or stand for?

Teaching or coaching Responsibility means creating the context of Responsibility. You create that context around you — in the space, the room, with the team, or community — by demonstrating Responsibility yourself, owning your power and ability to create, choose, and attract everything in your reality.

Ask for Responsibility

As we demonstrate Responsibility, we naturally want to surround ourselves with others who operate from Responsibility. How much easier would life be if we shared a common language and process for problem solving?

Unless you have an agreement with another person to operate from Responsibility, you have no right to expect it. And there is only one way to begin the conversation. Ask for Responsibility. The perfect opportunity is in a new relationship. In a new relationship, there is always an opportunity early on to state your interests, and to ask for operating agreements.

Here’s how you do this. Make a point by saying,

“My most important request is that we do our best to operate from Responsibility in our work together, knowing full well that things will go wrong, and that we’ll feel like blaming and justifying, yet we will get ourselves back to the mental state of Responsibility, which is the only place we can really solve the problem.”

Teach The Responsibility Process

Asking for Responsibility naturally leads to teaching The Responsibility Process. The best way to teach The Responsibility Process to others is to tell stories about your own coping habits. You can do that by giving examples of how you have recently caught yourself in Lay Blame, Justify,

Shame, Obligation, Quit, and Responsibility.

Stop the Responsibility-for-Advice Transfer

We give others advice because their anxiety makes us anxious and we want to do something. Stop. Instead Confront the anxiety and be willing to let it simmer a bit while you take Responsibility for keeping the problem’s Responsibility where it belongs. Stop giving advice, not to be mean or to refuse to be helpful or share your wisdom, but to ensure that others are thinking for themselves. And if you do give advice, give multiple alternatives so the other person retains the Responsibility for thinking for himself and making a choice.

Chapter 9: Leading the Organization of Choice

In the organization of choice, the culture focuses first on personal responsibility and then on role accountability. It is called Responsibility over accountability.

Responsibility First, Then Accountability

When a leader and organization value personal responsibility over role accountability, they get much higher levels of self-leadership, self-management, personal responsibility and shared responsibility throughout the system. They get happy people and high performance. And few people ever need to be called to account. Instead of needing status meetings and performance management meetings to inquire about why people are failing, people participate in team meetings, feedback loops, stand ups, and retrospectives where they are responding to the thousand little things that they can correct and improve.

But if we cannot connect feelings of ownership with performance expectations, then we can’t lead and manage effectively. The bridge from Responsibility to Accountability must connect two or more people or groups with performance expectations of each other, to the feelings of ownership in each.

The pattern naturally unfolds in five steps:

1. Am I Operating from Responsibility?

Practicing Responsibility means asking yourself, ‘How did I create, choose, or attract this?’ when facing unwanted results. For the leader of any organization, this means at some level you assume 100% responsibility for all causes and effects. If you don’t, you are denying your ability to lead.

When you do, you refuse to Lay Blame or Justify — behaviors that are far too common in

hierarchical leaders. You know Shame and Obligation produce poor results. So you get to ask yourself, ‘What part of these unsatisfactory results are mine to own?’ This of course is Confront at work as you explore your thoughts looking for insights about how to lead your organization to results that matter.

2. Do I Know What I Want?

Intention is the first Key to Responsibility and to leadership. Asking yourself what you want about a situation is the natural next step after checking to see that you are responding from Responsibility. If you aren’t crystal clear about what you want, you can’t effectively communicate direction.

3. Have I Asked for What I Want?

How quickly and easily we judge others because we know what they should have done. Such judgment isn’t going to change what they did. It is going to keep us from operating in Responsibility, and if we let our judgment loose on them, they likely won’t be operating in Responsibility. Instead, the leader knows that just because he or she knows what others should do or think does not mean that it has been effectively asked for or agreed to.

Making a request can be the beginning of a new relationship. It can mean asking for help or offering help, each of which is a move from independence to interdependence, or teamwork.

4. Do I Have Agreement for What I Asked For?

Leaders who operate from Responsibility enjoy the feelings of freedom, choice, and power that come along with it. They also want others to experience the same. And the way to do that is to lead in such a way that preserves other’s choices and the responsibility for those choices. Such leaders are keenly aware that yes is only meaningful in a relationship if no is also. Practicing

Responsibility means identifying areas and opportunities for true agreement where each party freely chooses yes.

5. If 1–4 Are “Yes,” Then Call to Account

The leader operating from Responsibility can, with full integrity, call other people to account for their actions or choices. Why? Because the leader has done the groundwork to establish where the breakdown actually occurred.

Conclusion: On the Road to Mastery

To bring this book to conclusion, this chapter revisits and summarizes core principles, truths, and practices that arise again and again as reminders or signposts in conversations about Responsibility among colleagues, students, and teachers.

When You Master Responsibility, You Master Your Life

It is not easy. Confronting anxieties is hard. It is, however, straightforward. The tools are precise and actionable. They work for anybody and everybody who wants change, who wants to lead themselves or others, and who wants to experience the ultimate benefits of taking ownership of

life.

1. When you think someone or something else is responsible for your problems and their solutions, that thought is the first problem you must solve.

2. The Responsibility Process only works when it’s self-applied.

3. Below the Responsibility line we talk about problems; above the line we solve them.

Good People Routinely Avoid Taking Responsibility

We are conditioned to feel bad about a problem or to do what we are supposed to even if we don’t like it, instead of growing and thinking for ourselves. We don’t need better coping strategies, we need breakthrough strategies for growth.

1. Responsibility isn’t your character; it is what you practice.

2. We are fully equipped to both take and avoid responsibility.

3. We are more powerful and able than we usually give ourselves credit for.

4. We aren’t bad or wrong for avoiding responsibility; we are simply and gloriously human.

5. Smarter people just make up better stories.

Nothing Real Happens Until Someone Takes Ownership of a Problem

There is so much talk about responsibility and accountability. If you are listening, you hear it many times a day, from advertisers, politicians, pundits, experts, and colleagues. Unfortunately, 99.99 percent of it is just talk, not actual demonstration. Until someone truly takes ownership, we will be stuck talking about problems and nothing valuable will happen.

1. Personal responsibility always trumps role accountability.

2. People naturally take Responsibility for what interests and inspires them.

3. Leaders make themselves by how they repeatedly step up and respond to problems.

Every Upset Is an Opportunity to Learn

We define what does and does not upset us. The illusion is that the problem is “out there.” This is a function of attribution. The source of the real problem is our internal conflict between what we want and what we have. The problem can only be addressed successfully at its source.

1. Responsibility is about what we think and do when things go wrong.

2. We’re always creating, choosing, and attracting our reality. We just aren’t always owning it, especially when we don’t want what we have.

3. The point of power is in the present.

Continually Discover and Focus On What You Want

Intention is the first key to Responsibility. If you don’t want to operate from Responsibility, the other keys don’t matter. As a sentient being, you have unique interests and gifts, and you have the right to pursue and enjoy them.

1. Allow yourself to want.

2. Not choosing is a choice. Claim your freedom by demanding to choose what you want to experience in life, work, and relationships.

3. Choices have consequences.

Check In and Notice Your Point of View

Awareness is the second key to Responsibility and the key to change. Perspective is extremely valuable.

1. Resistance — refusing to accept — creates anxiety and saps energy.

2. Everything we resist persists.

3. What we attend to grows.

4. Clarity leads to power.

When We Confront a Problem, We Begin to Solve It

The third key to Responsibility is Confront, or the ability to face something. It shows us how easily we shy away from or avoid problems or even just uncertainty.

1. Problems exist. There is no life without struggle.

2. Learning happens in no time. It’s not learning that takes time.

For Things to Change, First You Must Change

When we operate from Responsibility, we experience many benefits:

· We have the opportunity to grow and not simply cope with problems.

· We can capture and experience the three ultimate benefits: freedom, power, and choice.

Feeling free, powerful, and at choice means so much for us, our families, teams, and organizations, and it offers:

· a happy, fulfilling life,

· wonderful relationships,

· a great job,

· and more.

Adjust the way you feel about situations when you experience upsets or anxiety. Talk to others about The Responsibility Process. Don’t beat yourself up for being human, and celebrate wins!