On Futuristic Responsibility

So often when we talk about “taking responsibility for our lives,” the fun drains out and we end up in a blame game about who did what when — screwing whom.

“Personal responsibility” can devolve into a battle about whether people, ourselves or others, should somehow be “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps,” getting over it, stopping complaining, or suppressing what isn’t working. That should game is devastating, and can halt SO MUCH progress.

There’s a spin on “responsibility” that’s less like the should game, less a matter of justice, and WAY less reflective of judgment.

Thinking of responsibility in a futuristic way sets the tone for the future you want to lead into.

Taking 100% personal responsibility for nuclear arms, or misogyny, might not make a ton of sense.

But taking on a mindset of 100% future responsibility for the way your leadership lands with women or frequently underestimated folks in your work space can make a huge difference.

That change starts to show up when we shift our mindsets and commitment into that future of declared responsibility.

The magic legitimately moves when we act and continue acting from that commitment to a future responsibility, even if we literally just made it up or invented it freshly from nothing.

If you start from the standpoint that the future doesn’t exist yet, so literally anything could happen, you get to create it - as much as anyone else on the planet.

Anita Holub, one of the coaches I’ve truly loved in my life and career, used to remind me about my power to create by asking, “How’s life going over there, where you are?”

She’d say, “Life goes how you say!” — starting right here, right now, right in this very next moment. “So what do you say about how it’s going to go?”

The frame of responsibility as a future idea, that we can own by acting in total accordance with what we’re calling or creating about the future (at least around us), shifts the focus from what happened to what now?.

It’s consistent with the emerging research on how to move into states of post-traumatic growth after a massive hardship, rather than tpost-traumatic stress. Julia B. Canfield, referencing Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s work in Burnout, summarized once that post-traumatic stress asks “why me?” and post-traumatic growth, alongside tons of appropriate grieving, honoring, and story-sharing, asks “What now"?”

That “What now?” is the essence of futuristic responsibility.

It doesn’t mean the past was our fault.

It doesn’t mean we “asked for” or did anything to “deserve” what happened to us or our world through or lives (or the time before it).

But it does mean we’re signing up, and putting our word on the line, for a different future.

What would you like to take to 100%, if you could say anything, just by declaring your own “futuristically responsible” future?