Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
You are the only person who can change your life – no-one else can do it for you
Continuing the series on goal-setting, we start with the very first – and vital – step to achieving your goals.
To get results, action is necessary, as well as good intentions. The first step in changing your life is to accept responsibility for where you are now.
Make the Right Choices
To take responsibility is simply to recognize that you have the ability to respond to events as they happen. You cannot control what life throws at you. What you can control is the choices you make in response. This also means that you have a responsibility to make the best choices you can, and to keep learning so that you expand the range of choices available to you. The more options and abilities you have, the easier it is to make the right choice in any given situation.
Does that mean that you have to do it all yourself, without any outside assistance? No! There are some goals you can only achieve through working with others. You can’t make other people help you, but you can influence and inspire them to want to help you in achieving your goals.
Don’t Blame Yourself
Taking responsibility is not the same as blaming yourself, or other people, for anything that has gone wrong up to now. Everyone (including you) makes the best choices they can according to how they perceive the world at the time. It makes no sense to feel guilty about things you have done in the past, because at that time you were doing the best that you could. And if you regret a past action, that just means that you have learned from it and that you would act differently now.
Think Feedback, Not Failure
When you don’t immediately get the result you want, you have a choice about how you view that result. One way of looking at things is likely to bring you more bad results; the other gives you a chance to learn from mistakes so you don’t repeat them. You can label results you don’t like as either “failure” or “feedback” – information that allows you to correct your course. Which one will you choose?
Break the Circle of Failure
If you become accustomed to thinking of yourself as a failure, you are setting up a vicious circle that can be hard to break. If, however, you take all your results – positive or negative, as feedback – you are setting up a progressive chain of events: one you can learn from. So use ‘failure’ for positive results; if you did something that didn’t work, learn from it so you can do something different next time. If you treat every ‘failure’ as a useful learning experience, you are setting yourself up to succeed next time round.
Download the ‘Achieve Your Goals’ audio – a dual-induction self-hypnosis audio that’s designed to help you get clearer about what you want, and stay motivated getting it with the help of your unconscious mind.
© 2026, Andy Smith. All rights reserved.