Blame No Longer Interests Me

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The older I get, the less interested I am in whose fault something is. Which is funny, because fifteen years ago I'd have told you that acceptance was just another word for losing.

One of the things I've become increasingly aware of over the years is how differently people can experience exactly the same situation. Particularly in work environments, where there are often competing priorities, limited resources and a lot of moving parts, it's incredibly easy for people to walk away from the same project with completely different interpretations of what happened. What interests me isn't who's right and who's wrong. It's what happens next. Whether people become curious about the experience and look for opportunities to learn from it, or whether they become defensive and start looking for somewhere to place the responsibility.

The strange thing is that I don't even think most people are doing it consciously. Nobody wakes up in the morning intending to avoid responsibility and I don't think many people actively choose being right over getting better. But when we've invested time, effort and emotion into something, it can be incredibly difficult to separate ourselves from the outcome. The moment something doesn't go the way we'd hoped, our instinct is often to protect ourselves. We explain. We justify. We defend. And before long, the conversation becomes about preserving our position rather than understanding the situation.

I was involved in a conversation recently where somebody was expressing concerns about a project on behalf of somebody else. The details aren't particularly important and, truthfully, they're not mine to share anyway. What I kept thinking about afterwards was how quickly the discussion became focused on the things that had gone wrong, rather than on understanding how they'd gone wrong.

Like most situations involving people, there wasn't a single cause. There were constraints that everybody knew about from the beginning. There were communication gaps. There were handovers that could have been better. There were decisions that made sense at the time and looked different in hindsight. In other words, it was exactly the kind of messy situation that happens whenever human beings are trying to do something ambitious together.

What struck me was that the most useful conversation wasn't about blame. It was about ownership. Not ownership in the sense of taking responsibility for everything, but ownership in the sense of being willing to ask, "What was my part in this?" Because that's usually where the learning lives.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I would have viewed this very differently fifteen years ago. Back then, I genuinely believed acceptance meant surrender. To accept something felt passive. It felt weak. It felt like admitting defeat before the fight was over. I viewed life through a much more binary lens. You won or you lost. You succeeded or you failed. You got what you wanted or somebody else did.

Somewhere along the way, and recovery was certainly part of it, I stopped seeing acceptance as surrender and started seeing it as a way of engaging with reality. One of the most quoted lines in recovery is that acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. The first time I heard it, I thought it sounded far too neat to be useful. Life is messy. Relationships are messy. Work is messy. Human beings are messy. The older I've gotten though, the more I've come to understand that the phrase isn't really about accepting everything around you. It's about accepting reality as it actually is, rather than arguing with reality because you'd prefer it to be something else.

A few years ago, somebody very close to me was struggling. I suspected they had relapsed. Other people suspected they had relapsed. But every direct conversation I had with them suggested otherwise. I was left in this strange position where my instincts were telling me one thing and the facts available to me were telling me something different. In the past I would have obsessed over that situation. I would have spent endless amounts of time trying to work out what was true, gathering information, replaying conversations and building stories in my own head. Instead, I accepted the information that I actually had. Not the rumours. Not the gossip. Not the assumptions. Just the facts that were available to me at the time.

That didn't mean I approved of what I thought might be happening and it certainly didn't mean I stopped paying attention. What it meant was that I was able to create healthy boundaries and stop allowing a situation that I couldn't control to dominate my thinking. Eventually it turned out that my concerns were justified, but that's never really been the lesson I've taken from that experience. The lesson was understanding that acceptance and approval are two completely different things. I can accept a situation without agreeing with it. I can accept a situation without supporting it. I can accept a situation and still decide that I need distance from it.

I think that's where people often get stuck. Acceptance gets confused with giving up, when in reality it's usually the thing that allows us to move forward. If I can't honestly acknowledge what happened, including my own part in it, then I can't learn from it. If I'm only interested in defending myself, then growth becomes almost impossible because every lesson starts to feel like an accusation.

That's why I've become less interested in fault as I've gotten older. Not because accountability doesn't matter, but because blame and accountability are not the same thing. Blame is usually about protecting ourselves. Accountability is about understanding ourselves. One keeps us trapped in the same patterns and the other gives us an opportunity to evolve beyond them.

And honestly, whether it's recovery, relationships, leadership or work, I've found that life becomes considerably lighter once you stop fighting reality all the time. Not easier, necessarily, but lighter. Because instead of spending your energy wishing things were different, you can spend it responding to the situation that's actually in front of you.

I'd love to know what you think. Have you ever found yourself resisting a situation simply because accepting it felt too much like losing? And when you look back now, did acceptance actually take something away from you, or did it give you a way forward?

Eric x

P.S. A lot of the ideas in this email are really what led me to write 12 Steps to Success: Finding Your Purpose in the first place. Not because it's a book about recovery, but because it's a book about understanding yourself honestly enough to move forward.

You can find it here: Amazon

And if these are the kinds of conversations you enjoy, they're also the reason I started the 12 Steps to Success podcast. Available wherever you get your podcasts.