ATD Unload Revelation
In the military, drill sergeants had a saying:
“Don’t thank me. Thank your recruiter.”
Basically, I didn’t bring you here. Somebody else started this process. And the older I get, the more I realize there’s something deeper in that.
Sometimes when somebody has a problem with the way you are, part of me thinks:
Don’t be mad at me. Be mad at my parents.
Not literally. And not as an excuse for bad behavior. Obviously, at some point you become responsible for yourself. You can change. You can work on yourself. You can unlearn things. You can become somebody completely different from who you were raised to be.
But you didn’t start from zero.
Somebody taught you how to communicate.
Somebody showed you what love looked like.
Somebody influenced how you handled money, anger, conflict, discipline, fear, work, family and relationships. Even the things they never intentionally taught you still taught you something. And I think sometimes we spend too much time looking at the finished product without asking where the product came from.
I’ve always been somebody who goes back to the beginning. When something isn’t working, I want to know where it started.
Where did I learn this?
Who showed me this?
What happened that made me respond this way?
Was this something I chose, or something I inherited?
That doesn’t remove responsibility. It actually creates it. Because once you trace something back far enough to understand where it came from, you have to decide whether you’re going to keep carrying it.
Maybe that’s the full-circle moment.
Understanding where something started doesn’t excuse where it ended up. It gives you the opportunity to change where it goes next.
Something to think about.
