It wasn't me … little green men came down from space and did it. Honest.

A word in your ear, dear readers? Thanking you kindly.

It has recently come to my attention, that I am at last becoming a grown up, or a least that is how I appear to my contemporaries and the public at large. We’ll perhaps adress my inner workings another time. There are certain characteristics that seem to have developed in my life since morphing from a ‘youth’ to an adult, and one of those characteristics is the one I’d like to talk about today: personal responsibility.

Personal responsibility seems, much like common sense, to be one of those things that you assume everyone has until you are rudely proven wrong; as the universe saw fit to inform me by blowing an exceedingly large rasperry at me recently. Ppppfffffttttttt!

For those unfamiliar with the concept, we’ll start at the beginning with the foundations of personal responsibility, the basic building blocks of it, if you prefer. The keystone, for me at least, is consideration. Indeed for some, we are already jumping the gun. Consideration involves thinking about other people. Yes indeed. A tricky and foreign concept to many but a skill necessary for a harmonious existence (although if you’re one of the people who seem to rub along fine without it, you probably don’t care and obliviously leave trails of angry and frustrated people in your wake. Jolly good for you.).

It is a small thing, reader, that takes a mere moment but it requires us to use our brains (however large or small) to consider that other people exist and also consider how our actions impact on them. It’s a tricky one I’ll grant you but one that ought to be mastered perhaps by … say … the age of five. If you’re a latecomer to the notion, however, you might want to apply yourself to a practical excercise such as monitoring your actions for a day and trying to think of how this might affect the people around you. The next step is to alter your actions so that you affect people in a positive way and not a negative way, so add an extra column to your list from the previous excercise and in it, write what you could do to minimise the impact of your actions on those around you.

Once we’ve mastered this, you may (being the intellectually and emotionally advanced sort) want to consider moving on to the next stage in the game, which we’ll call anticipation. Now this one really is complicated. It really requires psychic ability of staggering proportions but for you, we’ll try and simplify things down a little. Anticipation involves looking to the future (yup that psychic bit). For those of you who are sadly not psychic though, we have devised a canny shortcut, called hypothesising. So, the basic technique involves looking to the future and trying to work out what is likely to happen based on our actions and alter them accordingly. I could give you a real world example, if it would help.

1. I have 2 dogs
2. I ask you to keep the cupboard doors shut to stop the dogs reaching things they shouldn’t

So would it be considerate to ensure the cupboards were closed. Quite right, dear reader! Well done, my you’re catching on quick., and if we were to add a little hypothesising into the mix we could perhaps attain a number of possible scenarios based on this example. So, if we were to leave the cupboard open, wih food inside, is it likely that:

A) A dog would look at the easily accessible food and say to itself ‘oh no, better not, I should wait til someone tells me to’
B) A dog would look at a tin of biscuits and think ‘oh no, better resist, they’ll go straight to my belly’
C) A dog would look at a tin of biscuits and think ‘WHEEEEEEEE. FOOOOOOOOOOOD!!!!’

The answer there would be C folks. If you know dogs it was obvious, but if you don’t, here’s a  clue ‘I asked you to keep the cupboard shut’ so logically there would be a reason for that, making C the most probable answer.

So to put it all together, let’s assume for some reason (perhaps you just sliced off the tip of your finger and weren’t thinking straight, or perhaps you saw a yeti out of the kitchen window.) you completely ignored what I asked you to do. You then completely failed to anticipate the most likely outcome of your actions and take steps to avoid it. Well, fair enough it happens to us all (and this is where personal responsibility really kicks in) … so you just hold your hands up and say ‘Hey, you know what? I forgot. I’m sorry’. You actually take it upon yourself and figure, Hey, well, I could have stopped that small thing happening and I didn’t. Oops. My bad‘. It’s not the end of the world.

What you don’t do is to make up a lie like “Oh the dogs unlocked the cupboard and pulled the door open with their teeth and then ate the biscuits … AND I WATCHED THEM DO IT AND DIDN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. Even though they’ve never done that before in their lives. No, really, they did. It totally had nothing to do with me“.

Why don’t you do that?? A number of small reasons:

• It’s transparent (you know you’re lying and I know you’re lying)
• Your excuse makes you seem like more of a jackass than simply admitting to a mistake
• It is just ever so slightly pathetic and childish
• … and finally you’re a grown-up so grow up!

Now go forth and share the joy.