Thursday, October 24, 2013

Are responsibility and accountability that scary?

It is interesting--in some work situations, home situations, and even some places where I am volunteer, I have just found lately that there is a great deal of resistance to being held accountable. And people resist even more so having their children held accountable. One of the most important lessons that I think people can come away with is that fairness and responsibility are in two different domains and have nothing to do with one another. We relate them because of our concepts of fairness--which is certainly desired--but when things are unfair, if we get hung up on that concept, we do not give ourselves the opportunity to learn or grow. When we think of something as unreasonable or unfair, that is where we have reached our limit in terms of responsibility. It is also the area that offers us opportunity in areas that we have not experienced before.