You started out with great plans. You were going to conquer the world. You had plans to do this and life was going to turn out like that. What happened? How could you end up so far off your target? Have you ever wondered how your life turned out the way it has? Your health, your relationships, love life, career, finances, business and everything else? Have you ever considered taking time to ask yourself what caused the specific results you keep getting in your life?

The Law of Cause and Effect.
The Law of Cause and Effect says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In other words, a result! Your results are the consequences of your thinking and behavior and, there can’t be more on the effect side than there is on the cause side!

Everything you are experiencing now, you created it for yourself – whether you were aware or not! Ouch! It’s not pleasant to admit or even hear. Believe me I know and sometimes it still feels unfair, but it is the truth. You did something! Whether it was a decision you made or did not make, an action you did or did not do or an attitude you have or need to have – the bottom line is you did (or did not do) something that caused you to get that particular result in your life.

“I did nothing” does not cut it anymore. As long as you are alive, you can’t do ‘anything’! Perhaps you spent your day sitting and doing nothing – and you refer to that as doing ‘nothing’ – but that is not the correct description of your actions. You did something; which was to do nothing!

Every thought or action you send out there must come back to you. It’s a Law! That is why you should always think positive thoughts, say good things to and about everyone, treat everyone with love and respect, and all these things will by law come back to you. If you concentrate on the cause, you never have to worry about the effect. Nature takes care of the effect for you without any effort at all. It happens by default!

Which Side Are You On?
Sadly, most people in the world are on the effect side of life. By the way, there is nothing wrong with that if it is your choice! On the one side of the coin, we have reasons (excuses) for not getting results. On the other side, we have results. Many people have very good ‘reasons’ for not succeeding in life – ‘my background’, ‘my family’, ‘my father’, ‘my mother’, ‘my friends’, ‘my siblings’, ‘my teacher’, ‘the economy’, ‘the government’, ‘my husband’, ‘my wife’, ‘my kids’, ‘education’, ‘time’, ‘money’, my sickness, my this, my that – the list is endless!

I’m like this because “They did this to me” or “They didn’t do this for me”. These are all reasons that will never take you anywhere successful in life! When you are 85, 90, 100 or 110 years old and look back at your life, how valuable and valid will those excuses be? How satisfying will it be to say: “Oh, if it wasn’t for so & so or such & such …. (fill in the blanks with your personal excuses)

Being on The Cause Side of Life
Most people avoid taking responsibility and are quick to shift blame. How many times have I heard people blame God for the results they are not proud of? Pseudo-spiritual people turn to victimhood when they are not proud of their results:

• “It’s this woman you gave me”
• “It was God’s will”
• “It was not God’s will”
• “It was not yet God’s time”

Really? If I may ask; when is it ever going to be your time to do anything? The same people, when happy about their results – where does God feature? Usually nowhere!

To be a success in life, be on the cause side of life! Be the cause for all your results. The good ones and the ones you are not so proud of.

When you start taking responsibility, your life changes for the better. You take back the power you’ve been giving away and place yourself in the position to make things happen for yourself rather looking to other people to do things for you.

Most people are on the cause side of life when they did something they are proud of and on the effect side when the results are opposite. This is a coping mechanism. A subconscious way making ourselves feel better by avoiding the pain of taking responsibility by taking credit for only the things that turn out well and at the same time playing the victim – rejecting responsibility for all the other results you don’t like!

What a childish game of rationalization –I call it rational lies! Painting a believable, easy and comfortable picture for yourself while ignoring the truth. The good results in my life, I created them, I take responsibility. The ones I don’t like, they happened to me, I shift blame, I am a victim! I got dealt those cards in life! It’s beyond me! It’s a higher power! I had no say! Really?

Successful people accept responsibility for all their results, both good and bad, and look for learnings, rather than hide behind spiritual pride and reject the fact that they were at the cause of their own behaviour, which produced the results they now have created. If you reject the cause, you close yourself off to learnings and will most likely keep repeating the same behaviours and, by default, get the same results. If you didn’t create it, there will be no learnings and you will probably create the same result again in your life until you learn what you needed to learn in order to go forward, grow and expand in life.

The children of Israel spent forty years taking a journey that could have taken them 11 days if they had taken responsibility. It was always God, Moses or God & Moses – and never them. Joshua & Caleb were part of that same crowd that repeated the same mistakes for forty years, but after forty years, they received learnings and went forward as a result. Be honest with yourself – what behaviours, patterns and results keep repeating in your life? And what are you going to do about changing them?

Learning Is Moving Forward
When you accept responsibility and learn from your past mistakes, you get new strategies, create new beliefs, make empowering decisions that you can use in the future so that what happened in the past won’t repeat itself. There will be no need. You’ve learned. You’ve grown. You’ve developed. You’ve moved on. In nature, nothing stays the way it is. It either grows or dies. You can’t just be. The comfort zone is death! Israel was so comfortable with slavery that they complained all the way – wanting to go back each time till they all died.

Take Responsibility, Not Blame
Taking responsibility is not about playing the blame game, but acknowledging the part you played in the situation, learning from your mistakes and moving forward. You can’t go forward in life while you are blaming yourself or others. Please note that I’m not saying that you create all the bad things that happen to you! The truth is bad things happen in life. However; your conscious and unconscious choices have put you where you are in your life. I’m talking about taking responsibility, seeking learnings, growing, expanding & moving forward. You can’t reach your destiny in life while you are still blaming your misfortunes on others.

Blamers do not advance. There may be movement, but no advancement. Blamers are never victorious in life. In the blame game no goals are ever scored, except maybe own goals. At the end of your life, you’ll look back and discover that all along you were moving in circles. You have stayed in this mountain for too long! You really have and need to renew your mind so that you can finally change the course of your life. You can choose to adopt an empowering mindset or become a victim for life and end up going in circles to nowhere.

Are You on The Cause Side of Life?
Are you in charge of your life and the results you are creating? You can’t play this game 50%! You have to be 100% on the cause side of every result – good or bad. Whether it is your health, relationships, bank account, spirituality, or any part of your life. The moment you exclude any result; stating that it wasn’t you and it just happened to you, you are a hypocrite! You change the rules at your whim.

The winning mentality says: Ok, it happened and:

• “What is my part in all this?”
• “What can I learn in all this?”
• “What can I do?”

Or, like an ostrich, you can bury your head in the sand and die in the wilderness. Nobody has power over your life besides yourself. No human being has power over you, except the power you give to them. Adam & Eve ended up being kicked out of the Garden of Eden which had been created for them because they refused to take responsibility for their results! Be honest; nobody has power over your life. Take responsibility and change your life. It’s in your hands!