Looking in the mirror
Fully owning your own shit and letting go of others'
One of the principles that shaped my life, which I adopted many years ago, probably catalyzed by reading Awareness by Anthony De Mello and recently resurfaced when I read The Courage to be Disliked, is what renowned psychotherapist Alfred Adler refers to as the separation of tasks.
Tasks are defined as anything that requires action. They falls either under my personal responsibility, or someone else’s.
Personal responsibility, also a term from Adlerian psychology, sounds like nothing special, unless it’s interpreted radically (to the root of the meaning).
To take ownership of one’s personal responsibilities is to shift from excuses or blame of others into seeing one’s situation as a direct byproduct of one’s decisions, actions, and behaviours.
I have found taking full responsibility for anything relating to me, to be one of the key ingredients in my recipe for joy.
A highly effective mechanism
Now, you might be wondering, “Sounds like this makes people hyper individualistic; wouldn’t that make people more miserable?”
It’s counterintuitive: By letting go of every responsibility except our own, our worries and to-dos turn into a much shorter list we can wrap our minds around. By no longer being expected to take care of others’ responsibilities, we have more bandwidth to focus on our own shit.
It’s most effective for me to take care of my shit instead of anyone else, since I am most familiar and intimate with my own issues and tasks at hand. Similarly, it’s highly inefficient for me to be responsible for your tasks since I don’t have the full context or understanding you do of what you want or what it means to be you.
It’s similar to putting an oxygen mask on before putting one on for one’s child during an airplane crash. Imagine the parent putting the child’s mask on while the child puts the parent’s mask on.
This is what I call a mess of tasks: an intertwining of responsibilities with another person, such that neither person knows what each one is responsible for.
Anthony De Mello puts it best in his book Awareness when he writes:
“She would love me at the cost of her happiness and I would love her at the cost of my happiness, and so you’ve got two unhappy people, but long live love!”
Isn’t it ludicrous not to be fully responsible for one’s happiness?
Relationships
As we can see, the hardest part is not fully owning one’s responsibilities, but the second half of the separation of tasks, which is not interfering with others’ personal responsibilities.
We weren’t set up for success, since “selflessness” is an ideal that is heavily promoted, at least in my environment during my upbringing. But what’s more selfish than being responsible for someone else’s happiness, leaving it up to others to take care of your own?
Other than unlearning selflessness, there’s another key thing to unlearn: The reflex to help with others’ responsibilities before taking care of my own. What helped me unlearn this reflex was internalizing that it is deeply selfish to want to help others primarily so that I feel good about myself.
It’s oddly as close to selfless as possible for one to take care of their responsibilities fully, to alleviate others of that headache.
Knowing very clearly what’s for me to take care of and what’s for you to take care of leads to healthier relationships because miscommunication is minimized. There are clear lines and boundaries of whose shit is whose, which expedites the triangulation process of figuring out who’s responsible for whatever did (not) get done.
Having this level of clarity in not just one relationship, but every relationship, leads to a significant decrease in drama and stress, and a significant increase in mental peace and bandwidth that we can apply to things that genuinely matter to us.
Leadership
If you’re a Founder or leader in your org, it’s deeply empowering to embody a separation of tasks.
It empowers you because you know exactly what your responsibilities are; therefore, you have a high level of focus, which translates to better performance.
More importantly, it empowers your team because you trust them enough to let go of meddling in their tasks, which makes them more motivated since they feel a sense of ownership over their tasks.
A prerequisite for leaders implementing a separation of tasks is trust. Without this ingredient, letting go of others’ responsibilities will feel like forcefully turning a blind eye. With trust, however, it feels like a liberating weight off your shoulders, and gives you back energy that you get to divert to your responsibilities.
Nowhere to hide
Lastly, a disclaimer: This method requires a significant amount of thoughtfulness. If you choose to implement looking in the mirror fully, you will have to reconcile all your assumptions, biases, and ideals that clash that rise to the surface. Fully owning your responsibilities especially includes your mood and emotions. It is difficult at the beginning to be fully responsible for one’s happiness because most of us are not well-versed on how to unlock our happiness properly.
But this is exactly the point of full ownership of one’s responsibilities. It’s not for others to figure this out for you, and I know when I put it that way, you agree. But if not others, then who has been optimizing your mood so that you’re the best version of yourself for those you love?
Usually, the answer is that no one has been deliberately cultivating your well-being.
So, now your journey begins, every day, by looking in the mirror.