Responsible Rita is all about being accountable for how you show up and the choices that you make in your life, Her flower is the Hydrangea which means transformation. Responsible Rita is the last character in the self-discovery section of the book.
So often we blame others for our actions, our thoughts and the choices we make. When things start going wrong, it’s nice and easy to blame other people. We say to ourselves, “everything was fine until so and so flipped out and went nuts over a situation, I don’t know what’s wrong with them.”
Not only to we blame people in situations, but we can blame our family, we can bring blame our upbringing, we can blame society as a whole. There are a lot of people who have had trauma or something bad happen in the past or others with genetic issues or something to do with your health.
And you can say well there's nothing I can do about that because it's genetic, or it’s my history or it’s just how I am. But if you do some research on Bruce Lipton you'll find out that actually none of that is true. And you can change your mind to change your genetics. It is an incredible field of study called quantum physics which is amazing, and definitely worth looking into if that's something that you're interested in, but essentially what Responsible Rita is about is, changing the way that you perceive things and being responsible for that.
What we want to do with Responsible Rita is start to flip those negative equations over and say, well if that situation went pear-shaped, what parts of that am I responsible for?
This a really massive part of your Change Journey, bringing your self-awareness into what you are responsible for. We're talking about your actions, the choices you make, the behaviours you demonstrate and also your feelings and thoughts.
For instance, if you're having thoughts like “I'm fat”, “I look terrible in this”. They're they are your responsibility, if you don't like those thoughts and if those thoughts aren't serving you and those thoughts aren't for your greater good, then it's your responsibility to change them. And only you can do that.
It's about deciding to change your story, choosing not to be the victim, and looking for the positives. The best thing that you can do with Responsible Rita, is to do a stocktake of where you're at, and look at your actions, your choices, your reactions to people, the feelings that you are having in different situations and ask yourself, are they serving me?.
If they are, great and if they're not… if they're hindering you… if they're becoming something that you think “this isn't what I love about myself”, then they're the things that you want to change.
When I did this, one of my issues was sarcasm. I have always been sarcastic. Yet when I learned about the power of manifesting, I realised that what I think and say, is what I'm projecting out into the world and that is what's coming back to me. And what I realised was, my sarcasm was what I was projecting out into the world.
If we were having an amazing day, I’d say “Oh, we have the worst life”. It was definitely sarcasm, because we were having an amazing day. But I was speaking the words and thinking the thought, “I have the worst life”. I was projecting that negativity to the universe. So I realised how bad sarcasm was for me, and decided to stop, I decided to change that part of me and not use sarcasm as much as what I did in the past.
One of the other things that I used to do all the time, was judge people.
I'd be walking down the street and I would see someone and based on their appearance, or what they were wearing, I would judge them. I would think to myself, well, they fall into xyz category.
Yet, I don't know that person, I've never met them before, they're just walking down the street, they might have had a really bad day, somebody in their life might have just died and they've gone down the street just to get the basic necessities and I'm there judging them because of the way they look.
I have a perfect example of a situation so you can see how bad I was.
I was on a plane flying to Queensland to see my parents. I was in the middle seat and the lady on the window seat was in a really daggy old tracksuit, she had hold in her pants and was wearing Ugg boots. To be honest with you, she looked like she had just gotten out of bed and straight onto the plane.
We got to the point on the flight where you had to turn you mobile phones off and she kept hers on. And I thought to myself… well this is interesting, you are clearly somebody who has no respect for authority, and think you’re above the rules.
As we were taxiing down the runway, her phone rang, and she answered it. I was horrified. I listened to her conversation, of course, because I was sitting right next to her.
Her words into the phone were “I've just got on the plane now, try and keep the patient as stable as you can. I'll be there within two hours max. Keep them in emergency, keep them as stable as you can and I'll be there as soon as I can.”
OMG… this woman was a surgeon. She was a highly qualified surgeon who had to fly at the last minute due to an emergency with one of her patients.
And I have no idea of her situation, she might have been on holiday in Sydney, she might have been fast asleep. She may have received this amazing emergency call, and had to dash to the airport as fast as she could. And there I was judging her for the way she looked and her “reckless” behaviour. For all I know she may have had special permission from the crew to keep her phone one as it was a life or death situation.
This day was a massive wake up call for me. How dare I judge people when I don't understand who they are, their lives or what they are experiencing at any given moment. I realised the pattern that was so detrimental and negative to how I was living my life that I decided to stop it.
So these are two examples where I took responsibility for the things that I was thinking, the actions that I was showing to other people but also to myself and deciding to change it.
I encourage you, when doing your stocktake to look at some of the actions that you do habitually and don’t realise you even do it, these may be the ones you want to change. That’s the beauty of self-awareness. Taking a step back to see what you're doing, take an outsider's perspective of yourself and saying, which of these actions don't I want to do anymore, or which of these thoughts or which of these feelings, don’t I want anymore. And how can I change them to be more positive, to bring more positivity into my life.
The other aspect of Responsible Rita is where you change the word responsible around, and you make it “the ability to respond”.
If you are lacking self-awareness, your thoughts, actions and feelings are coming from your subconscious, they're coming from habit. But you can bring in awareness and stop before you react and say, “hang on a minute, subconsciously I would have responded like this, but consciously, I want to respond in this new way, this more positive way, which benefits everyone around me.”
That's exactly what I did with my judgment. It didn't stop overnight. I just brought awareness to it. Then as a judgemental thought would come up, I would say to myself, hang on a minute, that's not how I want to behave. That's not the thought I want to have. So let me flip that. Let me just accept that person walking along the street, for who they are, for whoever they might be and whatever circumstances they might be in.
Lastly, many of us are waiting for somebody to save us. That can be because life is hard and we're waiting for that miracle cure, the flick of the switch for it to all get better.
It could be that we've been single, and we're waiting for the miracle man to come along.
It could be that we're running a business, and we're waiting for that miracle formula to drop out of the sky so we’re suddenly earning $100 million dollars a year.
It could be that we're waiting to win the lottery.
In all these scenarios, you're handing over your power of your life, waiting for something or someone to come and save you.
I hate to tell you… but no one is coming to save you.
The faster you can understand that no one is coming to save you, and it's time for you to save yourself, the better off you're going to be. And that's what Responsible Rita is all about, taking responsibility for saving yourself.
If you're in a life that you're not happy with or there are areas in your life that you want to change, that you think “I can do better in that”, “I can be happier in this”, then it is up to you to save yourself and bring in all your changes that you’d like to make.
That does not mean that you can't ask for support. That does not mean that you can't ask for help. But what it means is, at the end of the day, you're responsible for you and who you are, and the thoughts that you're having, and the actions that you're taking.
Responsible Rita is quite intense and serious. But that's why she's part of the self-discovery phase because if you don't get this at the beginning, the rest of your journey is pointless.
Remember this is your Change Journey, you have to be responsible for it. And if you decide that it's not for you, that's totally fine. If you say it's not the right time for me right now to have a Change Journey, then put it on the back burner for a while. Maybe in five years’ time, it will be. When the time is right the responsibility won’t feel heavy it will feel exciting and joyful.
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