Firing Up Your Ability to Respond

Do you get defensive and flare up when your willingness to be more accountable is questioned?

Have you noticed that it’s time to consider new responses to life challenges in order to make your dreams, desires and intent a reality in this New Year?

One of the gifts of growing awareness is waking up to the true meaning of taking responsibility for the choices we make. After all, the little choices made daily, add up to and become the content of our life’s story and thus the quality of life we experience. Our choices either support habits that limit and hurts us, or they reinforce our desires to live our soul’s potential.

The word responsibility often gets a bad rap. Drummed into our heads by adults with good intentions, our inner rebel pushes back, wanting little to do with what it might mean. It’s time to refresh our definition of responsibility and lend it new eyes so we change our relationship to an element that is so vital in helping us create the brilliant dream of our life.

4 Tips to Increase Your Ability to Respond to Anything in Your Life With More Awareness

1.  Start by taking another look at the word “responsibility.”

Simply, switch some of the syllables around, and suddenly the word is transformed into, “the ability to respond”. Now, doesn’t that create a different response within you and who doesn’t want to raise the level of your ability to respond to life and it’s many unpredictable doings?

2. Get clear about the difference between a reaction and a response.

An emotional reaction is nothing more than a golden opportunity in disguise to gain more awareness since they are just worn out stories that you haven’t given your full attention to. When you react, there is little or no awareness brought into the moment, you are simply on automatic, nobody home, and empowering an old pattern to make the choice for you. Reactions get you in trouble, trigger false beliefs and rarely lead to getting you where you really want to be.

Where as…….

A response indicates you are more present in the moment, having taken a nano- second or two to consider whether or not to agree with the internal dialogue in your head. It just means that you are aware that there might be another, even better choice lurking just behind that knee-jerk one that shows up first. Taking this time to capture your awareness also gives you a chance to check in with yourself to see if you are really as committed as you say you are to being the conscious creator of your life experience or not.

This one shift in awareness is the best investment you can make to assist you in stepping full-heartedly into your true, authentic nature in all that you do.

3. Rethink “ability” as a talent that enables someone to accomplish a great deal.

I can’t think of too many more things that are more helpful in life than having an ability to check my automatic reactions, because then I actually am taking real action…not re- action, as in being “asleep” and doing it over again and again… in the direction of what I have proclaimed is my deepest desire. Choosing my response, when possible, sets in place deeper discovery of the power of mindful choice. As my ability to be mindful increases so does my happiness and clarity.

4. Consider strengthening your “re-spond-ability” muscle.

With “the increased ability to respond” muscle functioning and on -line, you embrace every chance to own your creation, to affirm that you are a powerful dreamer and the “first responder” to what life throws your way.

Place your attention on whether you are reacting or responding with choice and watch your life energy increase and your most authentic manifestation with it. I hope you find it invigorating to discover that your re-spond-ability is growing.