Taking charge of yourself, showing self-control, and being responsible for your actions are crucial to maturing and developing as a person. Without self-control, you run the risk of developing addictions, losing money, gaining weight, or otherwise developing unhealthy habits.
Not taking responsibility for yourself and your actions can be detrimental to yourself and your relationships.
Taking charge of yourself is an important part of being a fully developed and well-functioning adult. There are ways to improve this behavior, however. We’ve compiled a list of ten positive habits you can develop to help you take charge of yourself.
1) Monitor yourself
One of the easiest ways to take charge of yourself, be responsible for your actions, and strengthen your self-control is to monitor yourself on a regular basis. Think before you speak or act and decide whether what you’re saying will be helpful or hurtful and if it’s necessary.
Analyze your actions at the end of the day; determine if there’s something for which you should hold yourself accountable and if there’s anything you should learn from to improve in the future.
2) Admit when you’re wrong
For some, this is the most difficult challenge to overcome in their lives. Admitting you’re wrong can be extremely hard, but necessary in order to learn and grow from our mistakes and move on. In order to take responsibility for your actions and take charge of yourself, you must first admit you are wrong; this will lead to repentance, forgiveness, and redemption with the friend or loved one you hurt.
3) Strive to be better
One of the most important ways in which you can take charge of yourself is to always make improvements. Strive to be better, learn from your mistakes, and implement changes to improve yourself, your self-control, and your personal responsibility.
4) Own your mistakes
While similar to admitting when you’re wrong, owning your mistakes can be slightly more involved. Owning your mistakes involves admitting to them, accepting responsibility for and the consequences of your actions, and using every opportunity it’s brought to the forefront as another opportunity to learn from your mistake and remember the error, so you don’t make it again.
5) Make achievable personal goals
A large part of taking charge of yourself is personal reflection, work, and growth. Admitting there’s a problem with you or your habits can be challenging, but even more so is confronting those problems head on and putting forth the effort to change them.
Making a list of achievable personal growth-related goals can help you start to progress along your journey to become a better person. You should start small with these goals, making sure each of them is achievable. Make sure you keep track of your progress as you go.
6) Make sure you’re staying motivated
Working on yourself can be challenging, but it’s a necessary step in taking full control of yourself and your actions. Staying motivated along your journey is key to seeing success. A good way to ensure you keep your motivation is keeping track of your progress as you proceed with your efforts to better yourself and rewarding yourself as you hit certain milestones.
7) Know your limitations
An important part to any effort is to know your limitations. Limitations do not make achieving your goals impossible, but rather, they make them puzzling. While some limitations can keep you from achieving particular goals, there’s often a way around our limitations that we can find if we try and get creative. This is most pertinent to taking charge of yourself in the way that it will help you identify the areas of this effort that are the most challenging to you.
8) Forgive yourself
While it’s important to own your mistakes and learn from them, it’s equally important to forgive yourself. You can carry the lessons you learn from your mistakes with you without having to carry the guilt. It’s important to allow yourself the freedom of forgiveness; besides, it’s unhealthy to hold a grudge, especially one against yourself.
9) Move past your flaws and errors
Moving past your mistakes, flaws, and faults is crucial to becoming a better person, improving your self-control, and taking charge of yourself. While forgiving yourself for these things is an important step, you can’t hold on to them forever.
Moving forward involves releasing the feelings of guilt and the weight of the mistake while internalizing the lessons that you learned from them, so you don’t make them again.
10) Take care of yourself
One of the most important steps in taking charge of yourself is taking care of yourself. Know your body and take care of it. If you need to take one day off a week to rest and relax with self-treatment, take one day for yourself.
If you need to step away from a particular situation to avoid backsliding into bad habits or behavior, remove yourself from it. You are important and so are your needs; respect that.