The First Step in Taking Ownership

Agency, personal power, has a somatic basis

Aloha dear reader. I mean it. Sending a wave of unconditional love to each and every one of you who has opened an email or clicked on a link to arrive here reading these words. Feel free to return the aloha by clicking the heart icon at the bottom of this essay. Even if you donʻt read the rest, just skip right on to the opportunity to share a little dopamine hit, a random act of kindness for your day. The blessing will return multiplied. It always does.

Since the topic is owning our promises, it would be appropriate to note that I am finally, after a few digressions, owning the promise I made to write about taking ownership. Taking responsibility. Exercising whatever power we have to choose and act on our choices. (Good thing I caught myself, as I was about to go down a different rabbit hole….)

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Why this photo? It struck me as a moment two beings connected and communicated across their differences. High five? I love you? Itʻs a Rorschach test.

Letʻs start with developing a shared set of distinctions around “taking ownership.” I wrote previously about ownership of property as a legal construct. There are also laws governing owning in the sense of taking “ownership” or responsibility for the conduct of our lives. Not laws as in a judicially enforceable code, nor laws as in rules imposed by authorities in government or religion or at work. I mean laws in the sense of how we as humans, as mammals with a certain social system ingrained in our bodies through our nervous systems and sensory structure, move in the world and coordinate action with others. Including the kind of coordination of action that particularly interests me - inspired individual action, actions that I define as leadership.

It will take several posts to unpack those somatic, structural “laws” about agency in the context of being human. First let me convince you that this is an empirical rather than a philosophical framework.

One of the first developmental tasks we have as an infant is understanding our own bodily agency. Hey, these limbs arenʻt random parts of the external environment! They are mine! Mine to move, and so I learn to move them in ways that give me control over the external environment. I can hold a sippy cup or stuffed animal with my hands. I can move across a room with the power in my legs. I also learn the limits of my control. My hand is not big or strong enough to open a tightly sealed candy jar. I cannot run faster than the family dog. Parents and older siblings can pick me up midway to my intended destination, preventing me from reaching it.

Once we learn to use words, we gain the powerful tool of using language to affect the behavior of others around us. We can make requests: “Please pick me up”. We can make offers: “Mommy/Daddy would you like a hug?” Through those requests and offers, and our developing ability to sustain attention in order to fulfill our intentions and promises, we begin to design a future that takes care of our needs and wants on a personal level. We can take ownership of creating conditions for our satisfaction.

As we learn to make decisions, in a healthy environment we learn to own the results of those decisions. Good caregivers require us as new actors in the world to take ownership of our actions and of their consequences. They teach us about choices, not just about rules. They teach us that whether the consequences are ones we desired or ones we dislike, the source of our power is recognizing, owning, that we created those results, so we can make different choices in the future. Under the guidance of our elders and caregivers, we learn how to navigate in the world when our decisions do not turn out the way we might have hoped. They empower us with personal and social skills with which to be responsible, generative humans.

When we donʻt learn to own our thoughts, actions, creations, or are discouraged from owning them, we fall into patterns of resignation or resentment. We disempower ourselves or accept the narratives that disempower us. We blame others. Either of these moods leads us to give away the power to take care of the things we care about, the power to reassess and navigated skillfully to a different future. Especially when we hit the inevitable breakdowns in the flow of our lives.

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We may also learn from those to whom we belong - our families, our social groups, our communities - to care about and take responsibility for more than meeting our own personal, immediate needs. Some of us are taught our care and responsibility extends to our nuclear family, perhaps our classmates, our friends, and our social group. Some of us are taught our care and responsibility extends to all sentient beings. Some of us are taught we are in mutual care and responsibility within an extended network of relationships to People and Place. Taking ownership for extended care and responsibility is another way in which Belonging matters.

Some of us begin in one of these frameworks, and our life experiences and education open us to a different one.¹ It is always hard when something, anything, calls or drops us on the path of needing to find answers to new questions, of needing to develop new responses to unprecedented circumstances, of needing to navigate a world that is suddenly more complex than the world as we saw it a day earlier. We now need to step out of our habitual patterns of thinking and action, and find new options that are appropriate to take care of what we care about, to create what we want, in what we perceive to be a new reality.

Sometimes the impetus to take responsibility for generating a new outcome for ourselves personally comes from outside us - a global pandemic, the loss of a job, our spouseʻs declaration that they want a divorce. Sometimes the impetus to take responsibility for a larger commitment comes from a larger existential threat. Sometimes it is a subtle as an inner state of dissatisfaction or anxiety, a calling to own up to something larger than our personal wellbeing. No matter the source of the push, the first step is to commit to finding our way. We donʻt begin knowing the answers to all our questions. We donʻt begin with certainty about what actions are possible - let alone which will be effective. We donʻt begin with any guarantees on the outcome of our actions. We will need to be open to acquiring new ideas, new allies, and new competencies in order to achieve success in fulfilling our new commitment.

But it always begins with committing - or recommitting. To taking ownership for creating a new outcome. Even if we donʻt yet have it clearly defined. Because sometimes we have to get on the path to see or be shown the destination as well as the path to it.

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A habit of observing and owning our thoughts, beliefs, and actions is a powerful start towards being able to navigate to a new future. Come back next week for more on the power of creating a new observer.

1. I recently, belated, read Education, the 2018 memoir by Tara Westover. Please read it if you have not. It gave me a new appreciation for both the difficulty and possibility of moving beyond oneʻs upbringing and unexamined assumptions about the world, through exposure to other people and ideas.