How to take personal responsibility

Sense, then decide, the way you want to be. Then be that way. (Isola Bella, Taormina, Sicily.)

'It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities.' - Josiah Stamp

Dodging our responsibilities might mean making other people responsible for our conduct, hiding behind grievances, governments or histories. Wasting energy complaining about poor school provision. Rather than grieving its loss and focusing our energies on educating our own kids. Instead, I suggest we are self-creating beings. Responsible for what we make of our lives. An existentialist, Quaker inspired, philosophical stance (Guignon, 2021; Sweet, 2025 & Bragg,2012.) So, to me,

'We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.' - Oscar Wilde.

My emotions whilst writing this blog included sadness and anger. At the struggle to understand and take personal responsibility. In response, this blog will detail ways to both dodge and take personal responsibility. We begin with two of my favourite dodges; holding an inaccurate view of ourselves and procrastination.

Holding an inaccurate view of ourselves and procrastinating

One way we can dodge personal responsibility is by holding an inaccurate view of ourselves. Maybe, attracted to a narcissistic view of ourselves. Seducing ourselves into believing we are more important than other people. So exempt from taking all our responsibility (Ripley & Ward, 2023.) Another part of ourselves may believe we are fundamentally worse than anyone else.

So 'if you [take the personal responsibility to] speak your truth, your tribe will be those who hang around.’ This part of you may say ‘what if I speak my truth and no one hangs around?’ So avoid doing so. As if our actual selves were incapable of taking personal responsibility and all other people would reject us for doing so. We can also dodge personal responsibility by procrastinating.

Procrastinating, if only we wrote more, thought more, or found the perfect way to be, then we would act. Choosing avoidance over hypothesis testing. As if any decision did not involve significant risk. In fact, while the past is often the best predictor of the future, it is also a poor predictor of the future. We may always be mistaken.

This means, sometimes, we only discover which things are possible by trying to do them. Even then, the full consequences of our choices may never be known to us. So to take personal responsibility, we have to accept, the known and unknown, consequences of our decisions (Dungan et al., 2015.) As such we may reasonably live in a state of ambivalent uncertainty about our decisions. Another way to dodge taking personal responsibility is by not understanding the fairness/loyalty trade off.

Fairness vs loyalty

Fairness and loyalty are both well established moral values (Buerk, 2025.) Which of these values we give priority, can lead to different conclusions, about what is the personally responsible action, in any situation. We need to consciously decide which action we think is most responsible. Guided by our moral code and emotions. Accepting that our actions may be experienced as a betrayal. When, in fact, sometimes betrayal is necessary. So deciding whether to be loyal, or fair, may actually be a choice of what, or who, we betray :

'Betrayal is a terrible thing, but without betrayal there can be no development....In betraying someone/something one is protecting someone/something else. And that someone/something else may be – in fact is likely to be – of real value...loyalty is a defence against becoming disillusioned.' (Phillips, 2012 & 2024)

So taking responsibility may involve protecting one thing and while betraying another. The personally responsible task is to choose. Next we consider how the time frame, of our thoughts, can affect how much responsibility we take.

The time frame of our thoughts

'If you spend too much time in the past you are going to get depressed, and if you spend too much time in the future you are going to get anxious; the goal is to try to live in the present.' - Group, 2021

Taking personal responsibility involves responding to the challenges we face in the here and now. This is because we can over indulge in a congratulation, or condemnation, about the past. Alternatively overly fantasising about an ideal or terrible future. Both distracting ourselves from the responsibility we can take in the present.

This is another dodge of mine. Instead I needed to learn and move on. Identifying my unconscious patterns and implicit biases (Ratliff, & Smith, 2021.) Making decisions after a reasonable information gathering process. In this way, taking responsibility can become an opportunity to do something different. That can be exciting as well as scary. How then to summarise what, I think, taking personal responsibility involves?

Sense, then decide, the way you want to be, then be that way

So if we are to take our personal responsibility. We need to habitually sense, then decide, the way we want to be, then act in that way. Meaning taking personal responsibility involves judgement. Judgement in order to make decisions. Decisions we are accountable for.

From this perspective life is a serious business. Our decisions will be consequential for ourselves and other people. Whatever we do cannot be undone. So, given our mortality, it's not a matter of whether we kill ourselves. Rather what we kill ourselves doing. At the very least we have to live with, and answer, to ourselves for what we do. That may be hard enough. This way of conscious living is not easy. Instead, as Auden (1927) suggests :

'A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep

Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:

Although I love you, you will have to leap; Our dream of safety has to disappear.'

However, the alternative, to a responsible life, may be even more difficult to live with. For instance, the most common regret people report, when they are dying, is 'I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me (Steiner , 2012.)' The choice is literally yours.

References

Auden, W. H. (1927). Leap before you look. Collected Shorter Poems, 1957. https://web.mit.edu/cordelia/www/Poems/Leap_Before_you_look.html

Buerk, M., (2025). Is loyalty a virtue or a vice? The Moral maze, Radio 4. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002548s

Bragg, M., (2012). In our time : George Fox and the Quakers, Radio 4 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01f67y4

Dungan, J., Waytz, A., & Young, L. (2015). The psychology of whistleblowing. Current Opinion in Psychology, 6, 129-133. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352250X15001839

Eliot, G. (2015). Middlemarch: a study of provincial life. ; Chicago / Turabian

Group. (2021, January 1). Booty call [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0tHswsB9Wg

Guignon, C.(1998). Existentialism. In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Taylor and Francis. Retrieved 12 Nov. 2022, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/existentialism/v-1. doi:10.4324/9780415249126-N020-1

Ratliff, K. A., & Smith, C. T. (2021). Lessons from two decades of Project Implicit. A Handbook of Research on Implicit Bias and Racism. APA Books. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

Steiner, S. (2012). Top five regrets do the dying, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/feb/01/top-five-regrets-of-the-dying?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

Phillips, A. (2012). Judas' Gift. London Review of Books, 34(1), 14. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n01/adam-phillips/judas-gift

Phillips, A. (2024). Youtube interview discussing how our experiences of frustration may facilitate experiences of satisfaction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3uXdJWWMAI

Ripley, B., & Ward, S., (2023) Pride, Seven Deadly Psychologies, (BBC Radio 4)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001sm82

Sweet, M (2025) Lights, Camera, Inaction: An Existential Guide to the Movies, Archive on 4 (BBC Radio 4) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gksj

n.b. I have also collated a list of other free resources on general health I have found helpful. You can find them here : CLICK HERE