Whose fault is it anyway?

When something doesn’t turn out as you’d expected, what do you do? 

Truth is, although we can choose to find fault with someone, that’s not going to help us moving forward.  

In my experience there are several alternatives we can use. 

 As with everything in life, you get to choose which you will select. 

Here are some possible choices …

1. We can complain about what happened. We can whine and moan about how it turned out. 

“the man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely the one who dropped it”

Lou Holtz

Generally, we only complain about something we could influence.  And something that we know could have worked out in a different way that would be preferable to us. 

Given that our responses are always a choice, we can choose to complain and continue complaining or stop complaining and look at the situation differently. 

2. We can blame someone else for what happened.

“all blame is a waste of time. 

No matter how much fault you find with another,

and regardless of how much you blame him,

it will not change you”

Wayne Dyer

Blame is a waste of time, according to Wayne Dyer. 

We can’t change another person apart from ourself.  You can only change you.  I can only change me.  So blaming someone else is a waste of time. 

Self-blame is also a waste of time because it focuses on what went wrong rather than what went well.  Plus, when you’re blaming you, you don’t have the energy to be curious about what you’d do differently next time. 

3. We can make excuses for what happened.

“ninety-nine percent of all failure comes from people who have a habit of making excuses”

George Washington Carver

When we make an excuse we’re really defending what we did and using the excuse as a reason for why it wasn’t as successful as we’d intended. 

Making excuses stops you seeing possibilities for changes you could make in the future so you enjoy more success and things work out as you’d planned. 

Our excuses will keep us stuck for as long as we allow them to. 

4. We can take responsibility for what happened.

“you must take personal responsibility. 

You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind,

but you can change yourself”  

Jim Rohn

It may not have worked out as you planned.  And yet, taking responsibility for how it ended up and what happened along the way creates the opportunity for you to learn valuable lessons from the event.

Those lessons can be applied to your future so that you achieve more success and things work out as planned.  That way you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work so well. 

There you have it, four different alternatives for you to choose from.

Which do you choose mostly? 

Which will you choose moving forward?

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