Responsibility
Take Ownership Of Your EmotionsIf you're going to work towards happiness, you will need to know who controls your happiness. It’s a fairly common belief that a person can make another person feel bad. “She made me angry.” “He upset her.” “He really pissed the boss off this time.”
I am going to challenge this idea and propose that...
You can not, in any way, ever, MAKE someone feel anything.
When I have talked to people about this idea, they inevitably bring up the time when someone had upset them or made them angry. They say to me, “they caused my anger for if they had not been there, and said what they did, I would not have been angry.”
I can understand cause and effect in the physical world. I push the pencil and it rolls. I drop a glass and it shatters. But cause and effect don’t translate very well into the emotional world.
When someone says something to you, are the words going directly into your brain and switching on your "I'm upset" lever? When someone gives you the evil eye, are they shooting laser beams into your brain pushing your afraid button? When someone makes an unfavorable comment about your hair and you become offended, are they sending invisible "offend waves" causing your response? No, of course not. How can words, sent out as sound waves and picked up by your ears then translate into an emotional response? Is there nothing between those sound waves and your response?
I think people have difficulty understand this concept of responsibility for their emotions because they make no distinction between influence and control.
Influence & Control
There is a difference between the terms influence and control. Influence has the potential to impact. It's indirect. Control has a direct effect on a result.
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