What if I told you that you could solve every problem you’ve ever had in life? That you could rid yourself of frustrations while feeling powerful at the same time? And that this solution could improve your relationships, especially with the difficult people in your life? But wait, there’s more! I’m giving you this magic cure for free! Don’t let the price fool you however, this is a valuable life skill that will not only improve your happiness but it can raise your social status as well as your career status. Putting this strategy into practice can completely change your life!
You only need to understand the root of all your problems. The one common denominator they all have. You. You are the thing in common between all your problems. The way you think and feel, the way you react, and the actions you take all emanate from you. All of these factors are used in molding your problems. Once you understand this and are able to accept it, you can get to work on changing what you don’t like in your life. When other people, events, or things are to blame for your problems you are at the mercy of fate, or worse, another human being. When you are to blame for your problems, you’re in luck because solving them is as easy as correcting your own behavior and nothing else can stop you. The path to solving all your problems is to try as hard as you can to blame yourself.
I call this a skill because it’s not easy to do, not in the beginning at least. Our initial reaction to a problem is to instantly throw blame on someone or something else. This immediately takes the responsibility of the bad feelings away from us. What we don’t realize is that it also takes control away from us. When there are people or forces outside of us causing our problems, then the solutions are out of our control. When we are the cause, we have absolute authority to correct the situation. Unfortunately we tend to dig in hard with our initial reaction of using the blame game. Our brain likes not being the bad guy and comes up with all kinds of reasons we’re correct in blaming outside forces. It bends over backwards justifying our assertion of blame. In the short term this makes us feel good, and it’s a lot easier than finding a way to take responsibility and then trying to solve the problem. But in the long term it solves nothing and prolongs our own shortcomings and weaknesses.
A lot of us are piling up so many problems over time that the weight starts to feel crushing. We reach the point of numbness eventually. It’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness when it feels like the world is beating us down almost daily. Viewing our problems as bad luck or intentionally inflicted upon us by others makes them feel exponentially worse than they need to. It makes us powerless, we become victims simply due to our frame of mind. Thinking through these same problems while looking inward and making ourselves suspect number one, is not only a problem solving skill, it’s an actual cheat code in the game of life. The first time you successfully re-frame how you view a problem, then find a solution based on that re-framing, you will feel absolutely empowered. When you start forming this as a go-to habit, you will feel unstoppable. It will bring calm and chill to your life and give you a confidence others will take note of. You’ll start to see your problems wash away. As the better you get at it, the more you’ll prevent problems from arising in the first place.
To overcome our lifelong habit of playing the blame game we’ll need to develop composure, awareness, and mindfulness. Meditation is the tool that brings those states to us in abundance. It will help you remain grounded and prevent you from lifting off with your rocketing emotions. It will help you stay in the present moment and avoid jumping to conclusions or creating stories in your mind about how someone else is at fault for your situation. It also helps you develop the ability to wait for more explanations from your mind. Part of the reason we’re so quick to blame others is that it’s our initial reaction, the first response our brain provides, and we just run with it. But if we have composure and we are mindful, we can wait and see what else our mind comes up with. As we learn on our journey to mindfulness, it can be multiple choice. We can choose our response to a given situation from an array of options, not just the first crude one we come across.
How can we blame ourselves for our problems? Especially if we believe it’s obviously not our fault? You have to have a desire to blame yourself. If you don’t want the blame then you want it to go elsewhere. If you want to solve your problem, then you should want the blame. Everyone else has their own problems, so they aren’t interested in solving yours. It’s your problem, so you must take the blame and then find your solution that involves your action to correct it. You have to be able to examine every action you took, every word you spoke, and every facial expression you made. This is why having a high level awareness and practicing mindfulness are key to this skill. They’ll provide you the insight you need to review your role in your problem. Then you’ll be able to find areas you can improve on or correct completely to find the solution. Even in a situation you think another person was mostly or completely at fault, you must still find a way that you could have handled it different to produce a better outcome. Think about it from the perspective that it was your fault, try hard with an honest effort, even if it’s hard to accept that you could be the cause. When you can figure out how you are the cause of one of your problems, finding a solution is as easy as changing what you did to cause it. With this strategy you will have a much higher percentage of correcting problems in your life and you won’t be passing blame needlessly to others, which can cause its own very different problems.
If it’s a problem of interpersonal relationships, you’ll be able to try and solve it with trial and error. If someone doesn’t treat you how you feel they should, you’ll be able to come up with new ways to interact with this person and see if it brings the desired change. You’ll be able to field test your ideas of why you’re to blame. If they’re mean to you, perhaps they view you as rude or a jerk somehow. If being nicer doesn’t work then maybe you need to have a little edge to yourself when dealing with them to gain their respect. Little by little you’ll find the path. Eventually you’ll create mental models for certain personalities you come across. You’ll see patterns in people and realize how to get the best out of them almost as an instinct. You’ll start accumulating respect faster than junk mail. Others will see you as a person of character who is hard working and never complaining or blaming anyone else. You’ll come off as positive, drama free, and competent which will make people gravitate toward you.
What if it’s something that truly seems out of anyone’s control, something akin to an act of god? Maybe you have to brave the cold or wet weather outside for some period of time. This is when the way you think and feel come into play. If you’re thinking ahead of time that you’re going to be “freezing”, then you will be. If you’re thinking in the moment how miserable it is that you’re in the cold and how badly you wished you weren’t cold, then you will be miserable and terribly cold. You have to change your mindset, you have to enjoy it and want it. Love breathing the crisp cool air, enjoy how the minor aches and pains go away when cold. Feel how your skin instantly tightens up and gets goosebumps to help protect you. Embrace the cold, marvel at it, experience what it feels like without the feeling of not wanting it. Focus instead on what you’re doing and on your breathing. If you’re not concentrating on a task, think of the feeling you get when sitting by a warm fire, and that feeling will come to you in the cold. You’re able to withstand it physically, you just have to crack the code of withstanding it mentally. Not wanting something to be the way it is and not liking something just makes your experience of it much worse. If instead you become indifferent to it, or better yet embrace it, your experience is transformed. You can keep yourself warm with just the power of your mind and breath, it’s just difficult to realize when we strive so hard to live in the same small temperature range year round with our a/c and heat dependencies. If you’re having trouble believing this then you should look into Wim Hof. I myself love to walk barefoot in the snow(just be careful when trying this as your feet will melt the snow and make it very slippy) and get weird looks from co-workers when I’m in the zero degree freezer wearing shorts and a t-shirt.
With this idea of blaming yourself, you can observe others throughout your day and how they deal with problems. You’ll start to see the patterns of blaming other people or even blaming objects. You’ll see them getting angry when they’ve made a mistake and start blaming anyone or anything around but themselves. Paying attention to the language they use when upset, you’ll see how they get mad at simple things like a key or a lock. They act as if the key and lock are supposed to do something, besides be inanimate objects. They’ll speak as if they were perfect error-less super-beings that would have spectacular days if only it wasn’t for that no good “stupid” key that “never works” in that “stupid” lock. After they open it, it’s clear that the key does work and that the key and the lock are not what is stupid. You also see this kind of angry lashing out directed towards other people when they start complaining how everyone is always a stupid moron who doesn’t know such and such and should have done whatever instead of what they did. They forget their own mistakes, shortcomings, and weaknesses when judging other people.
Witnessing other people throw blame all over, instead of at themselves, will help you better see the habit in yourself. This will be the cue to step outside of a problem you’re having and view it objectively, with the purpose of investigating how it may have been caused by yourself. Once you get this down you will have less problems and you’ll realize that the world isn’t against you, it doesn’t care about you. You’ll get good at solving problems you have and you’ll also get better at preventing them.
This is a great weapon to have for your fight against problems in life. Like all weapons, you must use it safely and with care in order to avoid damaging yourself. This is not to be used to beat yourself up or feel bad about yourself when you take the blame. The purpose of blaming yourself is to find an easy solution to solving your problems. It will also help you understand just how many times a day we all screw up, do or say the wrong thing, or forget something. Now you can take it easier on others you catch screwing up in a way that would have upset you before.
Blaming yourself will help create better social interactions with others. So many misunderstandings happen between people. Usually both people see the other as at fault or to blame. Taking responsibility for these situations, finding a solution, and moving past it quickly and easily will not only make your life better but it will help to better the life of the other person as well. You’ll find it a lot easier to get along with more people than you typically have in the past.
When we can blame ourselves for what we think is bad or wrong, then we have the power to fix problems on our own. Viewing sources outside of ourselves as the root of our problems leaves us powerless to solve them and turns us into victims that are perpetually trapped in upsetting and angering situations that we believe to be out of our control. Understanding that the source of our problems comes from within might sound a bit depressing, but it’s actually liberating. It allows us the freedom to stop stressing out over other people and events we can’t control and helps us focus on the root cause of our problems. Allowing us to find solutions to them at the source and create a better life for ourselves.
