Have been meaning to write this for a long time already. I took a course called Investment In Excellence, offered through the Pacific Institute. Lou Tice is the founder of the organization. This course is being offered at my work and looks like the goal is to get all 350+ people to take the course.
For those who do not know, Lou Tice was actually the Kennedy High School Football Coach. One of his buddies is Pete Carroll, head coach of the USC Football team. But this post is not about Football.
This post is about Lou Tice as an influential teacher, striving to help bring out the best of every individual that he teaches.
One thing he does is that every day, he would send to his mailing list a "thought of the day." I will continue to put the ones I really like up here.
Winner's Circle Network with Lou Tice - 11/6/06 - "Victim Mentality"
Do you feel that you're a victim? Now it is possible that you are, but accepting that label may be doing you more harm than good.
Victims generally feel that something bad has happened to them and they, themselves, are in no way responsible for it. Now, authentic victims certainly do exist - let's be perfectly clear on that. However, in a book called, "A Nation of Victims," Charles Sykes pointed out that far too many of us have grown adept at finding someone else to blame for our problems and ignoring our own personal responsibility for them.
When you give up accountability for any aspect of your life, you also give up control. When you give up control, you're basically saying, "There's nothing I can do about it. There's no hope of improvement." What kind of example are you setting for the young people in your life?
You see, the mindset of a victim is one of powerlessness, and with a mindset like that, you get used to behaving like a victim. It's a vicious cycle that can turn into a downward spiral, if you're not careful. For the protagonists of America's school shootings, the bottom of that spiral has been violence.
For the most part, they have believed themselves to be victims.
With the "mid-term" elections in the U.S. tomorrow, we have been flooded with TV and radio ads for weeks, even months. How many of those ads have tried, through the words used and the pictures portrayed, to make us feel like victims? To put the blame on "the other guy" or the other political party?
Is Mr. Sykes right? Have people come to define themselves, not so much by shared culture, but by their status as victims of just about everything - parents, men, women, the workplace, stress, drugs, alcohol, food, physical characteristics, racism, the "in crowd" and that great faceless thing called "the system?"
I'm afraid there's more than a little truth in this assertion. What do you think? Isn't it time we all take on a bit more accountability for our actions?
The Winner's Circle with Lou Tice
copyright The Pacific Institute, Inc.
Reprinted by permission
http://www.pac-inst.com/
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