Taking Responsibility For Your Own Life | Big Leap EP#68

Taking responsibility for your life. There was a day when I didn't and a day when I did, and everything has blossomed out of that day.

It's Buddhist drama at its finest. And suffering. It's real suffering. I'm watching my wife, you know, she's just brokenhearted over this.

If you have children, you don't need therapy because you can see your unconscious in them.

Hi, this is Gay Hendricks and welcome to the Big Leap podcast here with my soul brother and sidekick, Mike Koenigs. Hey, welcome.

Oh, this is. This is heavy. Thanks, Gay. We dove into something really raw and it's taking responsibility for your own life. We talk about dealing with teenagers, talking about our own struggles with family members in experiencing dementia, Alzheimer's, in your case, Parkinson's, with your big brother. And where responsibility is a complicated beast, we deal with at different stages, different levels in our life, and it means different things. What's your big takeaway from this episode?

Taking responsibility is one of the big art forms of life. And we're spending some time in this episode looking at how to get a 19 year old to take responsibility and remembering the 19 year old versions of ourself and how we struggled with that.

Yeah, a friend of mine that I play golf with sometimes, he has a good mantra that he uses. If he ever gets depressed, he says, he just says to himself, well, at least I'll never have to go through junior high school again. And that.

Hurts you right now.

I love that. Well, I'll tell you what, this is a deep, deep episode. We go to some raw, raw places. So I know you're gonna love it, and I'm positive you're going to have some comments that you're going to want to share with us. So without further ado, this is taking responsibility for your own life on the Big Leap.

Welcome to our Big Leap podcast. I'm Gay Hendricks, along with my good buddy, Mike Koenigsen. Mike.

Hi, Gay. This one is going to be a tricky one. We've been doing a little talking right before we started recording because it's going to touch home in all kinds of ways. But I'm going to let you frame it up.

Okay? One of the most challenging things in life, one of the most biggest challenges that any human being ever faces, is how to take responsibility and how to take responsibility for your own life. And how do you go about taking responsibility for the lives of people you care about? So it's the issue of responsibility. And.

My fear is that just by mentioning that word, people will be lunging for Their remote control. It's not a sexy subject, but I want to show you how absolutely, radically cool it is once you really understand the dynamics of taking responsibility for your life. There was a day when I didn't, and a day when I did, and everything has blossomed out of that day, which is now 50 years ago, but it seems like yesterday. So that's the general topic I want to massage here, Mike.

Yeah, and just, you know, the full disclosure part of this. One of the reasons why I asked Gay to do this episode is I have a 19 year old son about to turn 20, and he's going through some big challenges right now.

There are certain things I just can't say because it's his responsibility, not mine, to announce them. But he's exploratory. He went to school and his mother and I had some very specific agreements because it's a big expensive school. We've been footing the bill and we told him up front what our expectations were and he didn't achieve them. And now he's in a spot where he's got to live with the consequences and he doesn't like it. So on one hand he's like, I want to be free. I want to express myself the way I want to express myself. And he also doesn't want to abide by our rules of engagement. So he wants his cake, he wants to eat it too. And we've brought the hammer down hard. There is like no negotiating. And he's a great negotiator. He's always gotten what he's wanted. And. And unlike Vivian and I, who came from kind of nothing, she grew up very poor in Spanish Harlem. I grew up the oldest of four kids with no real resources in a little rural town in Minnesota. I never went to college. And here we are, we're, you know, wealthy now. We live in beautiful La Jolla, California. We've given him the ease, the best life possible in a beautiful place. And yeah, he doesn't want to let that go. I mean, that's the bottom line is he's had a great life and he wants it to continue.

And again, there's worse stuff going on than that, but that's where I'm going to leave it. And then I'm going to let you kind of drive things, Gay, and you can be my therapist. But my goal is to represent conversations I have with practically every adult with teenage kids and also adults who can't seem to get their crap together and spouses who can't get their spouse to get on the Dime as well. And also the internal struggles we have for ourselves when we know we're screwing up and not taking responsibility and lying to ourselves and stuck in our own addictive ways.

But lead us to the promised land. Gabe.

Well, first of all, I just want to say that I'm in it with the rest of you guys. You know.

I raised a teenage daughter who's now much older, of course, but so I've been through this drill also, being a therapist in my younger years, working with families and that kind of thing. I've seen this one up close and personal dozens, if not hundreds of times. So, yeah, so let's just turn on a wonder question in our minds is how can we as human beings learn to take responsibility for our lives? And so that's kind of the wondering I want to promote.

How can I take such impeccable responsibility for my life that it's automatically inspiring to other people? That would be a great place to start, because teenagers are always quick to point out any kind of hypocrisy, you know, if we're.

Oh, yeah, unless it's their own. Unless it's their own.

You know, if. If I'm telling my daughter to stop smoking pot, she's telling me, you puff on a joint now and then, dad, you know, you hypocrite.

So those are never fun conversations to have when we have to look at our own rank hypocrisy.

Yes. But I'm a responsible adult, and I am an earner, and I'm decades later, and I don't have the same challenges coming up that you don't know that you have coming up. You know, it's sort of like it's hindsight wisdom. Right.

You know, and also, one of my. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I often. The way I often go to the bottom line, you know, that's just. I don't waste a lot of time.

You and me both.

Yeah. I don't want to listen to the BS along the way. I want to lay it out the actual problem. And a lot of people, I think, don't like to face the consequences because there is some pain down in there that they've made off limits to themselves that must never be shared, must never be revealed. And I think that leads to the awesome defensiveness that a lot of adolescents have. You know, they will be absolutely rebellious to the core, even if it costs them everything, because what's important is preserving some little sense of themselves down in there that they don't have to share with the world. And of course the joke is on them because the act of concealing that thing is the thing that will keep you stuck in victimhood all the time. And victimhood gets less and less attractive as the numbers go up in the teenage years. So by the time you get a whiny 19 year old, it's much worse than a whiny 12 year old, you know, kind of.

Yeah, well, it's, I think, you know, you have a certain amount of control and influence up to a certain age and then you lose it. And let's face it, it's a natural, normal part of growing up. And as I jokingly say to Vivian, you know, most men are rotten, are rotten animals until they're somewhere between 25 and 55. You know, it's like when we finally grow up and you know, she, she often says I finally beat the boy out of him when she talks about me.

And, and, and I, I take that in a loving way, I really do. But it, it took a long time to be able to really hear and empathize with her point of view and what her perspective of living with me was. And I really get that, this whole idea of protecting a part of yourself. And again, a full disclosure. Again, I'm going to dance around this to not reveal too much without permission, but today we had an all family meeting and it was with a therapist and that was a big part of the negotiation.

And again, my son sees things through his lens and he wants what he wants and he can't get past seeing how it affects someone else. And he erases all the circumstances that got him there. And he lives in a state of victimhood and then he's mad and angry that he can't have his baa baa and his binky, but he wants his independence. You know, it's like I want to be a baby and I wanna be an adult at the same time. And it really is a classic Peter Pan.

Thing going on. I don't want to grow up. I don't want to grow up, but I want to have all the things that I perceive and still doesn't live in the world of how unforgiving the world is to someone who is incapable of producing.

Value, meaning true value, monetary value. And there's that gap, you know, the frontal lobe isn't developed, it's just incapable of seeing and understanding this stuff that seems so obvious to us as an adult. And you know, I can see how the fun disappears out of an adult brain, at least through the eyes of a child until you realize what a prisoner you are inside that child's brain. You know, it's delightful.

Tragedy to experience. And the only reason I don't get too emotional about it is because I just see it for what it is, which is it's a delightful tragedy and it's Buddhist drama at its finest.

And suffering, it's real suffering. I'm watching my wife, she's just broken hearted over this.

Yeah, she's a very sensitive person.

Yeah, yeah. Very psychic, very connected to ourselves.

I think one of the, actually a couple of the things that.

Causes people to have problems with taking responsibility is they experience it as fault. Like if I take responsibility, that means I'm having to admit that I'm at fault. And so that's not a very pleasant thing to stand up into is the experience of fault, being at fault. The other thing is many people, I think, experience it and sounds like he experiences it as a burden. You know, responsibility is a burden. It's not how I experience possibility. I mean, I experience responsibility as infinite possibility. If I'm willing to take responsibility for whatever it is, I can make it happen. But there's no way I can make it happen on the field from over here on the bench whining about not being in the game.

Yes, yes. So my immediate commentary, I'm going to go from the first or last one. First is experiencing responsibility as a burden. I explained this during our session today and I was like, you know, as I reminded him, without it being a jerk, you know, which is you can have whatever you want. You can imagine your way into anything you want. And I even quoted one of our podcast episodes. I realized that I was saying it.

You know, you, you have to learn how to receive anything you want. And that's going to come from really understanding.

Your ability, what your true value is in your ability. And that's what you've got to cultivate right now.

Is value. And again, I don't expect a 19 or 20 year old brain to necessarily get it, but hopefully hear shards of that truth. And where responsibility is a burden, I look at it and I'm like, responsibility is what gives you absolute and total freedom. It's when you're.

Decent and kind and people find you dependable.

Responsibility is character. And character is what enables you to have anything. You know, again, I suppose an indecent person doesn't actually have to have character, they could steal it. But I'm talking about the generally accepted rules of decency here. And whereas it as a fault, you're Absolutely right. Which is, I think the young brain, what I have observed is how can I avoid this feeling and how can I avoid this responsibility? It's like looking for a shortcut, looking for an easy way out, or being able to put it off a little bit further. That is the addictive behavior that I've observed.

Yeah. And it sounds like a lot of people. I remember when my daughter was a teenager. She wanted to be free and she wanted to be herself and she didn't want to follow my rules, but she still wanted me to pay for it. That was the thing that stuck in my craw.

That's exactly where we are right now, which is I want to continue going to this super expensive school. You know, I'm going to do better. You know, with no evidence of changed behavior, you know, it's like somehow it's going to miraculously happen with no plan and no commitment, no real commitment. The risk always comes back to you on.

You know, us smoking our hopium, watching the next disaster on the corner with no change of behavior, no change of discipline. And um, and yeah, yeah. And I, and we just said, you know, you can be as free as you want. Here's the door. And I don't know if I ever told you this. Gave it. When I was 14 years old, my dad gave me the greatest gift. That was one of the worst things I could have ever heard at the time. It made me so mad and so brokenhearted, you know, because I, I had a really good relationship with my dad, but he was a firm fisted guy. Like I got, I got spanked and hit a lot and I did until I was probably 14 years old, maybe 15. I mean, I was old and still getting it. And I think I was about 14.

And I was at it with my mom and my mom just had it for me and part of it. And I understand now, I didn't understand her point of view back then, but I was just a rotten little turd a lot of the time and sneaky and divisive and.

Tried to get out of as much stuff as I could.

So here's my medicine. Anyway, I went to my dad and I told on my mom about how she is a rotten bitch. And my dad just stopped me right there and he goes, well, son, I'm married to your mother, I'm not married to you. And if you don't like it, there's the door, get out of my house.

He made it very clear that was the last time we'd ever have a conversation like that. And it Had a little more theory behind it as well. Meaning the. The gateways of hell fire coming from my dad's mouth made it abundantly cleared that this was an off limits topic. And.

Anyway, there was like never ever any question about where the boundaries were. But what was good about it is like I knew where I stood and I think that was real clear. And when I look at how do you deal with an addict? You simply have. There's no negotiating with an addict. It's just gotta be a black, a white, a left, a right. There's no space for it and there's no turning back and there's no forgiveness until there's proven behavioral change.

Yeah. And I mentioned in our other episode.

Something that I've seen and believe for my whole career, which is an addiction is anything you lie about. Yes.

That was profound in our last episode.

You know, if you look at.

Where the lie is in a situation like this, you know, for one thing, you know, a 19 year old. If I'm a 19 year old, I'm lying to myself about some pretty important things.

Yes.

And I'm turning that fear about my lack of self knowledge, my fear about my not being able to make it in the grown up world. Yeah. And I'm terrified about that. Yeah. And the only way out of that territory, out of that terror. Terror in our 19 year old mind is to hit back at the people that are pushing me to take responsibility, to invalidate them, to make them wrong, to make sure that they know that they don't understand me. Yeah.

Yes. All of those things are absolutely true. So.

Well, you can't fall for that. Otherwise you'll just have to go through it again six months from now.

So what? So, you know, you've got a daughter. You've definitely, you know, we've had plenty of conversations. She was no walk in the park for you. And in some ways, you know, she's older now and you know, if I were your patient or we were your patient, what advice would you have that would help us negotiate to the other side, given the fact that you've seen this time and time and time again.

Yeah. Well, acknowledge that a lot of your past behavior is what's got him there.

Yeah.

You know, it's not hard. I mean, it's not easy raising.

A kid in any circumstances. But you know, amongst wealth and privilege and always being able to go to the summer camp and all of those kinds of things, it builds and I think a certain set of expectations that, you know, they begin to collapse suddenly when the world Puts more demands on you. My, my big advice would be.

Take a stand. Don't let yourself be manipulated. Let consequences occur. If he doesn't.

Show any sign of getting on the, on the plan, you know, it's not going to kill him to do a year pulling cappuccinos at Starbucks or it's not going to kill him to go to such and such a junior college. I'm sure they've got tons of them around there. Yeah.

Yep. They're about six grand a year too.

So that'll, that's very attractive. Yeah.

I mean it's really outrageous what college is charged now.

I mean it's just, it's full on gang rape if you ask me. So I don't know how to put it in, in not prison terms.

Well, also, if you're an out of state student, that's where the major gouges happen, right?

It is, totally. Yeah.

Well, I hope I haven't made you more depressed.

No, no, not at all. Like I said, I've chosen to open this up first of all, which every conversation opens up with me openly acknowledging my participation in creating this monster that we live with. And there's, I often say we can influence but we can't control. Right. I heard something quite profound over the last week, which is you can't tell people what to think about, but you can. Or what to think, but you can tell them what to think about.

And in the case of kids.

You can't control them. But as long as you're.

Empathic, you can influence to a degree and they naturally must separate, which is part of what this is about. So anyway, I open up acknowledging that and always take place full responsibility for being where we are. And then also say, you know, you are exactly where you need to be and where you deserve to be based upon your behaviors. And we have non negotiable rules and values in our home. And.

You know, I, I, I, I'm not, I will, I refuse to have a bad roommate. And right now this has evolved into a bad roommate situation. And our responsibility to you legally and financially ended. And now we expect.

You know, that certain expectations and rules that we agreed upon, you know, we had a signed agreement, you know, here's our expectations and you chose not to do them for whatever reason. Cockamamie excuse. You made up in your mind that you reinforced with your own. Whatever. No, but I'm not responsible for that. And I'm not responsible for how you choose to interpret it or choose to feel.

That's not mine.

Yeah. All right. Well, let's take a moment to just celebrate the incredible power of human resilience to reinvent itself. You know, like, Steve Jobs had to go to India and take LSD and a whole bunch of things that got him back to where he got to. So let's open up to the possibility of genuine miracles coming through from this very difficult experience.

Yes.

All right. Well, let us hope that everybody learns everything. You know, one of my mentors, Gordon Allport, great developmental psychologist at Harvard, said if you have children, you don't need therapy because you can see your unconscious in them.

You don't need to keep a dream journal or anything like that. Just look at the things in your kids that you find most obnoxious and learn to love them in yourself, and that'll give you a little more leverage to help them change.

Yeah. And on top of all this.

We love him sincerely. And I see the struggle. I saw it. And, you know, I. I went through the same stuff, you know, so did. So did Vivian. And I can remember hearing parents talk about their older teens or their early 20s going, wow, wow.

I can't.

I can't imagine that happening with my kid. You know, my perfect little. And you know it. Definitely you get a. And as he would say, well, I haven't been arrested for drugs. I haven't been jailed. I haven't gotten a dui.

What's the beat?

Yeah, exactly. That's what it is. It's like, well, you know what? Not a good opener. Not a good opener.

You know, So I like to say the cleverness, though.

Oh, my God, he's such a great negotiator. I think what I've told Vivian before, you know, she's like, you know, she's all worried about what's he going to be when he grows up and what's he. You know, what's. And it's sort of like he came out a negotiator. He's always been a great negotiator and split in hairs, and he could totally be an attorney or a negotiator or even pull off the ambassador thing. You know, it's like he'll get in there and get inside someone's head, and I think it's fantastic.

So.

Any other advice?

Learn to love the place in yourself that you don't still take responsibility.

Oh, God, that's a juicy one.

Yeah. That's for everybody. That's for me, too.

Yeah.

All right, well, let's take on the subject of responsibility many more times in our future, because it's one of the great subjects of wondering. But here's a final big boomer of a punchline about responsibility. The act of taking responsibility for. For your life lines you up with the creative forces in the universe. Because taking responsibility is saying, oh, I created this the way it is now. Let me see what I want to create. You know, it's that moment of turning your unconscious manifestation into conscious manifestation.

Yes.

Yeah. My comment on that during our session today, that's precisely what I told Zach. I said, I know this sucks right now. I know this is hell. But I promise it'll make you a great man. You'll look back and say you'll find turning points and great lessons in here that you'll be able to reflect back.

And in the meantime, there's fury and anger in motion throughout this.

Yeah.

I couldn't.

What I can't come to full terms with is how little control I feel I have other than acceptance and trying to appreciate and observe and be grateful for not having a greater challenge to deal with.

Well, you're also modeling how to live in the real world with values. So that's another kind of unconscious communication about all of this, is you're fighting for certain values that you hold dear.

So if you were going to.

Forecast the future for a moment, gay. And imagine into some possibilities.

Or looking back at your own life.

Now that you're in your.

Mid-70S.

And looking back at being a father and a spouse and what you feel responsible for now and what you look forward to being responsible to.

Where there's some significant.

Turning points in your life or things that you think about right now that you feel are unique to your perspective.

Your maturity, wisdom, or age.

Yeah, well, I think my big turning point happened when I was 24, because I'd created my own version of what your son has created and what you and Vivian probably created. A whole bunch of messy circumstances that you thought you had no control over. So I did a whole bunch of that at 19, 20, 21, 22, 23. And then on one magic day in when I was 24, I, you know, suddenly saw through all of that and had my first conscious thought about what I wanted to create in my life. And so that took me to 24. Some people, it might take to 54, I don't know, but. But I've met people, on the other hand, that had that when they were 14 years old, and I've even worked with some of those folks. But, you know, time, in a way, doesn't matter. The only matter is when the person actually gets it for themselves, whatever it takes to produce that. And your son has produced you telling him that, but it's not until he actually. Oh, yeah.

And does it himself. So.

I would expect a few more years of fits and starts and then he'll get on the right wavelength, but it probably won't be because of repeated harangues by you.

Yes. Yeah. And I have taken myself out of the equation for the most part, other than there are certain times when I have to just say, here's what's acceptable, here's what isn't. And you can choose, you know, you can choose the path you want, but if you want it to be around or with me, these are my non negotiables.

And here's. Here's the date by which you need to have your bag packed, etc.

Yeah, yeah, we're crystal on that. And.

I got really clear with being okay with that, which is probably the hardest thing of all. Right. It's letting that attachment go and knowing that.

When I talk to so many people, it's as usual, the messenger appears when you need the message. Now that I've had this conversation, I can't believe how many parents say they open up and tell me some of the dark stuff that never would have come up in a conversation about their struggles. And, you know, the realer you are, the realer the conversation gets. And I know in a previous episode we talked about that openness to being authentic.

And.

Yeah. And you know, this is a day and age too, when there are huge consequences. I know two or three friends, well, two for sure, that.

Their children of 19 in one case and 27 in another case just didn't make it. You know, they ended up dying as a result of drug addiction. And so, you know, we have to face the fact that these days there are a lot more ways to mess up than there were for me. You know, the worst trouble you could get into in Leesburg, Florida, was maybe steal some watermelons or something like that. Yeah, yeah.

Now. Now it's licking a fentanyl envelope. You know, it's. I'm. I'm exaggerating on purpose, but it's.

Or, you know, one tiny slip and it's prison for 20 years. Seven to 20 years. And yeah, it doesn't take a lot to tip the law for sure. So I.

And, And. And that there is something so un. Innocent about that. I know that's not a word.

But we live in many ways a more complicated world right now. And yeah, again, there's, I guess, becoming clear on what gives me solace is.

Being okay with not being in control.

And the only thing I can control is how I choose to interpret the activities that are taking place around me and how I. Yeah. How I choose to interpret and feel about those and paying attention to what I'm thinking about.

Yeah. Because like, I know I'm having a lot of emotional stuff with my brother right now. He's 85 and he's gone into dementia. And he's always been the sharpest guy in the room, you know, funny and wise and creative and everything. And it's really been devastating to watch him turn a corner there. And the thing I think that's. I've gone through the same thing, Mike, of that whole letting go of control, you know, because my first impulse was to call, you know, all my neurologists, you know, friends and everything like that.

But letting go of control, yet at the same time having resonance and empathy with what they're going through. I think that's a key to it, to keep our hearts open to what they may be going through. Even though there's no solution that I could, from 3,000 miles away have any kind of effectiveness with.

Yeah, yeah. When my parents started going through, in my mom's case, Alzheimer's, my dad's case, dementia.

Even though, like you, I've got access to some of the finest doctors and specialists in the world, it was impossible to create compliance. My parents were just like, they couldn't remember what the hell they agreed to 10 minutes ago. So I would have had a full time nurse there, which they would have objected to, or in the case. Now they're under, in a care facility, they just don't allow any kind of integrative therapy, advanced therapy at all. And there's no one to deliver it. So it's.

You know, and you know, I can see the arguments for, you know, which are you don't want a bunch of quacks running around in a care facility.

And when you've got genuine, you know, great researchers taking care of your parents, it was just a no win situation. So I, I really empathize with what you're experiencing. And I know before we started recording today, we just talked about just how devastating it is to observe it. Feel like we don't have control and just letting go of our attachment to the people who matter most to us.

Well, it's a good lesson to get at my age, 77, or anybody's age, because, you know, I've got lots of things coming up over the next 10 years in my own life that.

I'm sure will be difficult to adjust to. I've still got all my marbles and everything. But.

Yeah, when you start turning your head and you hear gumballs hitting the floor, you know, what the hell, this ain't cool.

So.

All right, well, listen, I love you and I appreciate you and I'm in sympathy and empathy with all the things you're going through. I've been there myself and in that kind of a loop. And we'll probably be there again another way. So blessings to us all for going through the developmental changes in life and with as much ease and grace as we possibly can.

For sure. Well, maybe the way to wrap this up is one of the asks we made in the last episode is if you've got a big idea, you've got an ask. You've got a big question that you want Gay and I to dive into and either play therapist like Gay did with me today, or just dive in and explore these experiences, these feelings.

That can help you accomplish and reach your own big leaps. Head over to bigleappodcast.com there's a form on there that you can send a message. You can post a question in the comments on Apple as Well as on YouTube. I have an assistant who checks those often. And lastly, if you'd like to learn more about the Big Leap experience where Gay and I work with you on finding and staying in your zone of genius, you can text the letters bl285-59553958 or just head over to bigleappodcast.com apply. So, as usual, Gay, always a pleasure. This took a different turn than I expected, but the unexpected is always pleasant and fun with you.

Hear, hear. All glory to the unexpected. All right, well, thanks a lot everybody for joining us here. And Mike, thanks for your wisdom and input today. I really enjoyed our conversation. Conversation.

Me too. Always a blast. Thanks.