Welcome to the last of my four-part series on taking full responsibility for what happens in your life. With this entry, I’d like to look back over the previous three parts and highlight the most important points.

No Excuses and No Blaming Others

I used many examples from my years in college throughout this series because college is the first time young adolescents are completely treated as adults. There’s a big difference between high school and college, and if you’re not willing to take full responsibility for your actions and your decisions, you can have a rough experience in college and life.Teachers of younger children will sometimes make excuses, including blaming others, for why homework isn’t done, or a group project missed the mark. That doesn’t happen in college because the instructor doesn’t care about how things get done—just that they get done.One of the great embarrassments of my life was the day I had to walk into a professor’s office and explain to him that I missed a test because I fell asleep in my car before class. The reason I fell asleep was I had arrived about two hours early after coming off one of my two full-time jobs working back-to-back shifts.I could have blamed the financial aid system for forcing me to have to work that much, or my uncle (who I lived with) for living too far away to go back and get proper rest at his place, or the people I worked with at both jobs for exhausting me more than usual.But the truth is—I didn’t properly set the alarm. It was my fault. I made the decision to take the jobs, and I made the decision to take the class.It was nobody’s fault but mine.

No Complaining: Instead, PracticeForgiveness

There are going to be things that you can’t control in life, like Mother Nature or how somebody else reacts to something. Since you have no control over those things, complaining about them can’t possibly help the situation.Then there are all of those situations that you can do something about but, instead, you choose to complain. If you come home to an empty refrigerator and blame your spouse, aren’t you taking your responsibility for filling the fridge off yourself and putting it on someone else? What’s stopping you from getting in the car and going to the supermarket?Complaining is about finding a scapegoat when things don’t happen exactly the way that you want them to unfold. Here’s something you may or may not know.

• The rest of us want to hear your complaining about as much as you want to hear ours. Most of the time, it falls on deaf ears and makes you look like a small person.

Instead of getting angry at your spouse for not filling the refrigerator, try forgiving them. Maybe they had a rough day; perhaps they just forgot. Once you start practicing forgiveness, you learn just how unimportant most of the problems you complain about actually are.

Learn from Your Mistakes and Don’t Repeat Them

There’s a saying I like that applies to being tricked into doing the same thing over and over.“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”I believe this philosophy perfectly applies to when we make mistakes as well. It’s completely normal and human to make mistakes, but what we do with the knowledge we gain from them is the real test of how well we take responsibility.From Elizabeth Taylor to Larry King and Frank Sinatra to Ric Flair, the entertainment world is full of people who have been married many times. Why does somebody who continues to make the same mistakes in marriage get married again and again and again? When you’re married five or six times, it shows that you have no idea what you’re doing wrong or how to fix it, it also indicates you don’t take your vows seriously.And it’s not just in marriage where you find mistakes repeated.If you’re continually making the same mistake, you need to take a pause and analyze the situation.Ask yourself these questions.

• What is it that you’re doing wrong?

• What is it that you can do next time to avoid the same mistake?

While taking full responsibility for your life may sound like a lot of work, the payoff is ten times better than if you continued to live a life of blaming others for your shortfalls.I hope you’ll try some of the alternative solutions I’ve offered in my blog series and let me know how they work out for you.