I Abdicate Responsibility for Others' Lives

I was feeling frustrated yesterday evening. I got home from work, talking under my breath about my husband who wants to start a new business but isn't doing the work to move forward. My son who says he wants to join the military but isn't studying for the ASVAB like the recruiter said to do. I was feeling so much responsiblity to push them, to make them move, make them take a step forward. After all, I'm their support system, right? Isn't that my job as a wife and a mother?

Suddenly I found myself in the middle of the kitchen, supper simmering on the stove behind me, and I yelled out - I give up all responsiblity for others' lives! Do you hear me? I abdicate all responsibility. It's up to them to do the work, it's up to them to live their lives and make their choices. There's nothing I can help them with at this point. They have to take the next step themselves and I abdicate responsiblity!

I felt so much better after this outburst. I have no idea where it came from or what led me to do it. I just knew it felt right and I finished making supper and spent the rest of my evening working on MY work instead of trying to do their work.

Who are you trying to "make" move in a certain direction? Let it go, abdicate responsibility, let them work it out, and go about your day.

No Accident Stories

My brother-in-law is a policeman. He's assigned to traffic duty, which means he spends the majority of his time doing various things like issuing traffic tickets but he also investigates accidents.

Each time we visit, we hear a new story about an accident. Sometimes they are funny, sometimes they are devastating. And I understand why he talks about them. To get some of what you see as a policeman out of your head, you need to talk.

But each time we've visited, we've either seen accidents while leaving town or had a few close calls -- someone merging into our lane and not seeing us or stopping suddenly.

We don't want to tell him not to tell the stories, but it is obviously reaching us in some way so that we manifest seeing or experiencing an accident of some type. This doesn't help me, since I have anxiety in large cities and in high traffic situations.

Before we go back for another visit, we have a plan set up to avoid accident stories and not let them come into our personal experience.

1. Set an intention that BIL will not discuss an accident.

Since we know that we are co-creating, BIL's intention may be stronger than ours, so --

2. If he does start a story, I will excuse myself to the kitchen or bathroom for a moment.

3. If still telling it when I return, we'll steer the subject to something else, something more positive.

4. Set intention that no matter what BIL says or believes - because with his job he's now seeing accidents everywhere, so it's now part of his belief system that they're inevitable - we will trust that we will be safe and that other drivers around us will also be safe.

Are there things that your friends or families discuss that you do not want as part of your belief system? How are you handling those situations?

Learning Lessons at Work

I'm going through some stuff at work right now where some things I've done or been doing are being questioned. And it really doesn't bother me. And it doesn't bother me because I am not going into the process re-actively.

Since learning about the Law of Attraction I try to into each day looking at what I can control, what I can make of it. I already talked about how I prepave my day. I ask for it to be a good day. I ask for time to pass quickly. I ask for projects to come my way. I don't necessarily ask for conflict, but without conflict how will I learn? How will my supervisor and co-workers learn?

So since I knew this was coming since Friday, I prepaved for it. If my supervisor's questions had come at me from out of the blue, I would have done things differently. But I'd had some heads-up that she wanted to know how things were going with me - I've been at this job a year next week - and wanted to go over some things were some tasks were falling short.

While the old me would be looking at this as conflict and criticism and would be hurt by it, the new me is very calm about the whole thing. It's like I'm looking at myself from a distance. I'm keeping the entire issue at a distance. It's nothing about me personally. It doesn't mean that I don't do a good job. It does mean that there are some skills lacking, maybe some communication issues between us, but that can be fixed. Skills can be learned, communication can be better.

So I am setting an intention for this process as well as continuing to look at it from a distance. And I'm asking myself, "What can I learn from this process? How did I manifest this issue? -- Because if I take 100 percent responsibility, then I did. If anything, I co-created it. What do I want to take away from this issue?"

My intention is:

I intend that both J and I will learn from this issue and it will help us to work better together for the good of the company and the people we serve.

I'll check back as things progress and report on how I'm answering the other questions. And I'll look back on this as well as time passes and look in hindsight, as we all do, at the lessons learned at this point in time.