Two speakers explain why taking accountability for your own patterns matters more than waiting for others to change. They describe how people get stuck repeating toxic behaviors while trying not to look selfish, and argue that real growth requires doing your inner work regardless of whether your partner goes to therapy or your kid listens.
Chapters
when someone says to me, listen, I'm willing to take full accountability, everybody's a narcissist and everybody's this and everybody's that. We all have these tendencies. And on one side and the other side is, well, I don't want to be seen as selfish, so therefore I will do X, Y, and Z to not appear that way. But we all get stuck in our own patterns, even though we think we're doing something good or we're trying to be better for the world and our people in our lives, or even more so for ourselves. So I want to have people just kind of like think about what's the like What is it that you think that you're looking to solve? What is it that you think like, gosh, this is the thing that keeps happening to me over and over again that, you know, I'm kind of reading or listening to podcasts or I'm Googling, you know, for episodes on these type of things. And how are you showing up in those situations? So when someone says to me, listen, I'm willing to take full accountability, I realize that, yes, there might be problematic situations in my life around me, whether it's work or my relationship. And obviously everybody has to do their work, but I want to do it regardless of the outcome, regardless of if work gets better or not, regardless if my partner goes to therapy or not, and we do couples counseling or not, regardless if my kid does better at school or gives me less lip at home and does more chores and responsibilities. I want to know more and do better. I think that's a great way of starting where their outcome isn't dependent on someone else having to do the work.
Which circles back to what you said earlier, people who are willing to take the accountability, do the work, ask themselves, what do I miss? And it comes back full circle.
