Conscious Accountability
Accountability. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot, but what does it mean?
Well, there is what society tells us it means, which is to fix the problems that we see around us. Being accountable means fixing things that we think are wrong. Accountability from a societal perspective, is an ego-driven behavior fueled by judgment.
From the Oxford Language dictionary accountability means, “the fact or condition of being accountable; responsibility”.
What do I believe accountability means?
Being consciously aware of every thought, feeling, action, and word you put out in the world combined with a willingness to own those things when, inevitably, mistakes are made.
Accountability to me is an internal, non ego-driven, conscious awareness that allows a person to manage themselves ( their own thoughts, feelings, words, and actions) within their own life experience.
What does that mean in a practical sense?
No more triggers.
No more throwing pain around.
No more habits of response and reaction.
No more tuning out.
No more unconscious behaviors.
No more auto-pilot.
Yes, I know, that’s not easy and we’re human. We’re going to make mistakes. That why accountability includes owning it later. We can’t change what’s already happened, but we can certainly understand our own behavior, own it, and then correct it for next time.
I don’t believe in perfection. I don’t really believe that true enlightenment is possible while still living the life you’re living. The only people that manage enlightenment in this life are the ones that go live in a cave, surround themselves with a handful of people that do absolutely everything for them while they meditate 18 hours a day.
The reason I say that is because for the vast majority of us enlightenment is not the purpose of the human experience. We are here to live our lives, to deal with the duality, to experience joy and pain. We are here to do all the things as it were. Enlightenment for most of us, defeats the purpose of being in a human body.
Some of us can and do get close to enlightenment but because we are still active, functioning members of society, we never fully achieve enlightenment. There are too many opportunities for the humanness to show up. There are too many triggers, too many stimuli, too many opportunities to be annoyed and frustrated. No matter how good you are at managing yourself within that, the margin for error is still too significant to become a fully enlightened being that would no longer make those mistakes. Again, you can get close, but unless you live a life where you remove all the stimuli, the perfection of enlightenment is impossible.
What I believe is that we move towards being fully accountable for ourselves. We do the best we can to become as fully aware of ourselves as possible, and then own everything we put out in the world to such a degree that we are willing to apologize for and admit to any mistakes that are made. If we don’t handle something well we own that every time and apologize for it as needed.
We’re not going for uncomfortable and awkward. We’re not doing this in a way that makes us not confident in ourselves. We’re not doing this in a way that requires us to be paranoid about our every move. We’re just doing this in a way that allows us to be consciously accountable and aware of ourselves within the experience. We’re okay with making mistakes. We’re okay with owning those mistakes. We’re okay with doing our best to correct our behavior in future situations. As long as we’re doing that, then we’re on the right track.
Every thought, feeling, word, and action that you have is energy that you put out in the world, whether you express those things or not. They affect your choices. They affect how you show up later. They affect your responses and reactions to everything that happens around you. They affect how you see your world. They are part of the filter that you use to interpret your world.
If you’re not aware of those things because you live on some degree of auto-pilot your world starts to feel quite out of control. You may start to wonder why things don’t work out for you and why some things keep happening. That’s all part of the unconsciousness that still exists in your life.
Why do we like to stay on auto-pilot? Why do we like Netflix so much?
Because consciousness, when you first start trying to live that way, is overwhelming. It just is. There are a lot of thoughts running through your head that you don’t have control over. You may be an emotional wreck with feelings flying everywhere all the time. You may have a ton of triggers and unconscious responses to all kinds of things. That may be overwhelming enough to make you want to avoid the whole thing all together.
I get it. I was a train wreck. I know what that’s like. I know how overwhelming it felt to try to get a handle on my thinking at first. I started with simply trying to manage the thought loops. I focused on the thing that was in my head the most at the time. What’s on replay in your head right now? Focus there first.
Why? Because it’s the easiest and most obvious. At this point we’re not trying to fix that thing or heal it in any way, we’re just trying to stop it from replaying itself in our heads. That’s it. What you’ll find when you do this is that it immediately frees up space. You’ll instantly feel better and your mind won’t feel so out of control. If you did nothing else except shut down the thought loops running through your head, you would feel better automatically. It would give you the perception of having more control, even though you don’t.
That’s the beginning of being consciously accountable for your thoughts. You start to become aware of every thought you have. I don’t suggest anybody start here because most people tune out 80% to 90% of their thoughts on a given day. There’s just so much happening in there that you don’t even know what’s happening in there. That’s okay. Starting with the thought loops makes that process less overwhelming. It eliminates a lot of thoughts quite quickly, which allows you to find the thoughts that are actually causing you problems and stopping you from doing what you want.
Everything you want is on the other side of you becoming consciously accountable for yourself. The more aware you are of your own thoughts, feelings, actions, and words, the easier it will be for you to identify the struggles within yourself.
What are you afraid of?
Do you know what you want your life to look like or is it buried under pain?
Do you know why that thing keeps happening?
Do you know why you keep running away from that goal?
Have you started trying to figure yourself out or do you just assume that all the pain is who you are?
Being able to answer these questions requires you to heal and become consciously accountable for yourself. But I don’t suggest or even believe in shadow work and deep emotional healing. I don’t believe that going snorkeling in all the pain solves anything. As a coach, I don’t try to trigger pain. Emotions or pain are something that we just happen upon along the way. It’s totally fine if that happens, we can deal with it when it does, but it’s not the reason why we’re doing this. The goal is to get the mind untied from the pain and then shift the behaviors that are attached to the pain. Freeing the mind frees you emotionally, mentally, and behaviorally. Your mind should not be your own personal prison.
Taking conscious accountability for yourself requires you to have a mind that’s free of the filters of pain that we so often carry around. I compare those filters to colored funhouse mirrors; they are heavily distorted and also colored by drama and the wild stories the mind likes to make up. Learning to see the drama and the distortion helps us make the experience more neutral. The experience just is. It’s our human judgment and all the filters we have that make experiences good or bad, right or wrong.
If you’re able to see how you filter experience and how that’s creating pain for you, you can shift it. It gives you some control over your responses and reactions to what’s happening in your life. That’s a good thing because you can’t always control what’s happening, but you can always control what you feel, think or do about it.
Ultimately this is how you feel better in the life you’re in. It gives you control without you taking control of other people or trying to control everything that goes on around you. It gives you back your power in a way that is actually feasible, it’s doable. It doesn’t require anything of anybody else.
When you change yourself within the experience, the experience changes – not because you changed the outside world or made anybody do anything – but because you now understand yourself within the experience. You’re now consciously accountable for everything you put out in the world.
Love to all.
Della
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