Hi! I want to talk to you today about another common occurring theme that I see a lot in my kinesiology practice. Today I want to talk about responsibility. We all have a lot of responsibility and it often makes us feel overwhelmed and burden. Quite often I see  people who feel like they're not carrying the responsibility well and they're not performing in the way they want to.

What I've discovered over many years in my practice is the relationship between how we see responsibility today and how we've experienced it in the past, particularly in our early childhood.

     So, let me explain it like this. If you have a lot of responsibility, you need to have an equivalent amount of power. Power means that you feel competent that you're able to do something about it. Responsibility and power go together. We know this with teenagers. If they want more independence and more self-empowerment, then they need to take more responsibility. That's how we grow up.

If you had been given a lot of responsibility when you were a child, this may have created an imbalance as a child doesn't have any power. If a child or young person is given a lot of responsibility but not the power, then the gap between the responsibility and the power can cause a lot of low-self esteem.

     We can judge ourselves harshly because we feel like, "I have this responsibility. I want to fix these things." Often we want to fix the relationships within our family, things that aren't going on well maybe with our parents, or our siblings, or the family circumstances. If you were young and you felt like you took on responsibility for some of those relationships and for some of the dynamic that was going on in your family, you would've taken on a lot of responsibility, but you didn't have the power. This will be one of the common reasons why many of us have low esteem. We feel we can't do what we need to do. We feel overwhelmed by the challenges in our life.

So, what I recommend people do is, have a look at the responsibilities you've got.

•      First Are they really yours? Quite often, a lot of the responsibilities, that we particularly as mothers carry, is responsibilities for our husbands and our children, our parents, and other siblings. We have to allow people to be responsible for themselves. That way, they will empower themselves.
• Allocate them out over time :  as you get the list down a little bit, look at what you need to be responsible for today or this week or this month and starting doing a bit of a plan, like we often do for businesses.

     We talk about doing business plans and setting our goals. If you think about this: 1, what I'm responsible for and 2, have a plan to achieve that and make it on a timeline. "Okay. So, this week, I need to do this, and I need to be responsible for this today." Then it breaks it down and it makes it feel much more achievable and a lot easier for you to accomplish it the way you want to. Then, you'll feel good.

So, I hope that makes some sense, and you get encouragement and empowerment out of that. Let me know what you think.

Please post in the comments below and tell me how you're coping with your responsibility and your level of power. Okay.