Are you “at cause” or “at effect” in your life?

We literally don’t know what 2020 is going to throw at us next. We don’t know when someone might blindside or hurt us. A drunk driver could pull in front of our car and cause a serious crash. The senior leadership team decides on a restructure and the culture of where we work goes toxic as a result. 

As recently happened in Bradford-on-Avon where I am living, they put a traffic light system across an idyllic bridge and nothing short of hell broke loose.

But we can look at if we’re living on the side of being either “at cause” or “at effect” in our lives. In our relationships. In our work. In how we respond. 

Training as an NLP practitioner last month, this is a key concept that I am keeping top of mind and practicing day-to-day. Let me warn you, it can be a bit uncomfortable and I see why it’s not popular! 

I am responsible and at cause for everything in my life

How does it feel to say that? Is there something that you say, well no, in this situation it really was out of my control - I didn’t make that hire, they caused the argument, I had no idea a pandemic was going to happen and cause redundancy. 

If this is your reaction, it can be surprisingly empowering to look at where you might be “at cause” of the situation. You took on a job and you didn’t check how you’d be allocated your team; you didn’t communicate a strong enough boundary that would have prevented the argument in question; and you made the assumption that in a volatile world, that job or industry would be eternally stable. 

It may be the case that with something like an earthquake or a death, where you are of course less “at cause” for the actual event, you are still at cause for how you feel about the situation and how you react. Things that are so definitively out of our control, we step into the power of how we reframe and what meaning we decide to take from the event. You only need to look to how Viktor Frankl views his time in a concentration camp to see how a different meaning can be found in events.

With 1000’s of people going through the process of redundancy right now in addition to other hardships, there will be people that hold different mindsets, reframes and meanings around essentially the same instances. As Steven Covey points out, you can look at the term ‘responsibility and read it as ‘‘response-ability’ - our ability to respond to something. We have control over this. 

It’s not always easy I know, but something we can practice. Something I am practicing. A mindset to empower your life and to help you take more responsibility. 

My growth as a coach

I have always been a warm, supportive, extremely empathetic style coach, friend and colleague. When someone is facing something difficult, I hold a judgement-free space and am able to really feel what that other person is feeling. I champion them and seek to ensure any shame is melted away - because I know a lack of compassion and self-empathy doesn’t usually lead to helping yourself from a healthy place. 

However, I see part of my role as a coach to be able to observe and listen to someone carefully so I can act curious around either hearing shame or seeing diminished responsibility for something. To also help spot incongruence or discrepancy in what’s being said.

I’ve asked myself recently, how can I help someone shift from feeling more like a victim to seeing the possibilities of where they are “at cause”? How can I empower someone?

When I was working as a health coach to help people cut back on sugar, the term ‘sugar is addictive’ was bounded around. I would often hear people repeatedly saying ‘sugar is addictive’ or ‘I’m addicted to it’. I started to notice patterns - the people that were doing this seemed to be shifting to a more disempowering state that possibly meant they ate more sugar - it was like they were confirming this concluded part of their identity to prove themselves right. Ben and Jerry were literally calling the shots and they were powerless! 

Yes, science shows that sugar does trigger the brain in similar ways to cocaine and that we are biologically designed to gorge on it. But if we blame sugar as a substance completely for how we behave, we shirk away from the responsibility of our own actions. And I used to sometimes point out, if sugar is so addictive, why isn’t the whole world going that crazy for it? (you might argue that they still are).

Where today could you be more “at cause”?

So the purpose of this article is simply to make you think... Where are you attributing some blame in a situation that possibly with a closer examination, you can see you can be "“at cause for?

Your health? Something at work? A difficult relationship?

Empower yourself right now either with a different perspective or a different response and see if you feel a bit of a shift. If you do, feel free to comment and let me know. 

Laura xx