On Course Chapter Two Summary

Chapter Two was mainly about accepting personal responsibility. Personal responsibility is accepting the fact that we are resposible for the decisions we make and therefore, how our lives turn out as a result of those decisions.

There are two kinds of people, with varying degrees of each. There are Creators who change their behaviors to obtain the best outcome possible of any situation, and there are Victims who keep doing what they've been doing all along, even when it is obviously not working. Creators accept personal responsibility for their lives while Victims blame everything that goes wrong on outside forces. Being a Victim means that while bad things may happen to you, you let these events ruin the rest of your life as opposed to a victim, who is a casualty of misfortune, but attempts to set their lives back on course.

Choice is a big factor of personal responsibility. The first part of how a choice dictates whether you are a Creator or a Victim is the incorporation of a stimulus, which a person responds to, depending on their choice. A victim resorts to blaming, complaining, excusing, and repeating their behavior and as a result rarely acheives their goals. A Creator responds by seeking solutions, taking action, and trying something new if their method does not work. Creators frequently acheive their goals because they know they are responsible for creating their lives as they want them to be. They evaluate their lives and decide whether or not their outcomes and expiriences are what they want them to be and if they are, they do as they've always done. If not, they make new choices.

Self talk is also important in taking personal responsibilty. Again, the Creator and the Victim are very different.

A Creator listens to their Inner Guide which makes the best of any situation and tells the impartial truth.

A Victim listens to their Inner Critic or Inner Defender. The Inner Critic judges a person as inadequate, and blames them for everything that goes wrong in their lives. The Inner Critic frequently sounds like a judgmental adult from their child hood. The Inner Defender blames everyone and everything around the person for what goes wrong in a person's life. It usually is drawn from a person's childhood self.

A person must be careful when making their choices, as they decide who they are. Making wise decisions helps get us the results we want out of life, which essentially allows us to create our fates.

The wise choice process requires you to assess your present situation, and compare it to what you want it to be. Then you evaluate your options, and the outcome of each choice. After all of this consideration, you make your decision. Hopefully, after all this brainstorming you have come up with the best possible outcome for the situation. In this situation, the Creator makes their decision while a Victim 'goes with the flow' and then blames someone else when things don't turn out right.

Sadly, most of the time it's not the actual problem that upsets a person, but what they think is the problem. By listening to the Inner Critic or Inner Defender, a person will often respond to a problem that's not really there; an irrational belief. But if a person listens to their Inner Guide, they look at the situation, offer evidence that the judgments are incorrect while finding a positive explanation. They then question whether the issue is important, and if the judgments turn out to be true, improve the situation.

Personal responsibility is a wide and extremely varied subject. With topics such as choice and irrational beliefs, there were many personal expirience segments throughout the chapter. The chapter emphasized the fact that it is important to take personal responsibility for your life so that you may shape it to be what you want it to be.