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Responsibility
By WILLIAM J
PRICE
Saluki Head Coach
One of the most
misunderstood aspects of character development is responsibility. Several
years ago I came across the best definition of responsibility that I have
ever read and although it seems a bit esoteric, it is nonetheless useful in
illustrating who is responsible and for what. Here it is:
"Responsibility starts with
the willingness to acknowledge that you are cause in the matter. It starts
with the willingness to deal with a situation from and with the point of
view, whether at the moment realized or not, that you are the source of what
you are, what you do and what you have. This point of view extends to
include even what is done to you and ultimately what another does to
another."
"Responsibility is not
fault, praise, blame, shame or guilt. All of these include judgments and
evaluations of good and bad, right and wrong or better and worse. They are
not responsibility as they are all beyond a simple acknowledgment that you
are cause in your own experience."
"Responsibility is being
accountable without judgment as the source, agent or cause of everything in
your life or experience."
In other words, and it took
me a while to figure this out, we are responsible for everything. Narrowing
it down to our team situation it's helpful to see that we're responsible if
our cap tears when we're putting it on. We're responsible if we can't find
our goggles when we need them. We're responsible if we miss practice.
I have found it very hard
to describe what this means to our swimmers. The largest barrier to
understanding responsibility is our society's fascination with assigning
blame. If something goes wrong we immediately seek ways to deny
responsibility and assign the blame to anyone but ourselves.
What is to be done? Being
responsible means that we acknowledge that we are cause in the matter. If a
cap rips or goggles go missing then we simply use our other cap or pair of
goggles. Responsible swimmers always carry spares. It means checking swim
bags before leaving home to make sure that everything needed at practice is
in them. It means being aware of warm-up times, team meetings etc. It means
staying in the game and realizing that most of the time what you know and
what you do is up to you.
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