The Problem with Blame

Most of us have been there. Something happens — maybe it's your fault, maybe it isn't — and your first instinct is to point at whatever or whoever caused it.

That's human. That's normal. But how long you stay in that place, and what you do to get out of it, is entirely up to you.

That's what this piece is about.

Several little experiences over the last couple of weeks that just keep reminding me of how easily we can get lost in blame and why it’s important not to. It’s sneaky the way it can pull us away from taking action. And interestingly, while we all push to demonstrate our own independence, blame is almost an about-face that marches us directly out of our autonomy and agency. 

One of the most comical situations that has come up was during some travel. Rushing through the airport because I was afraid I was going to miss my connection due to a delay earlier in the day. I was full on sprinting through the Atlanta airport, desperate not to miss my next flight. 

I had two things running through my mind while I was running through the airport. One - the damn rain…we never would have left late if the rain hadn’t been so heavy in the middle of the country. And two - why in the hell couldn’t the gate agent get that valet door open for the bag the airline MADE me check at the gate.

If I were late, it wouldn’t be my fault. It was the rain and the gate agent. And I could feel myself getting angry about it. And that’s when I realized I was blaming, and I had a couple of choices: continue to be pissed off or remind myself of compassion and empathy.

While I was rushing up the escalator two steps at a time with a bag in tow, I remember thinking to myself, ‘Who says life is fair?’ Flying on any airline is a tremendous modern convenience, and I paid for that. But nowhere does my paid ticket indicate that I am entitled to perfect weather and no mishaps. 

That’s just not real.

By the time I got to my gate (there was another delay by the way), I made a choice. I chose empathy for the gate agent and let the rain just be rain.  I purposely reminded myself that while I really WANTED to get home as early as possible, there was no emergency I needed to get home for. And not surprisingly, after I settled into that thinking and stopped blaming, I was able to focus on what I was capable of doing and felt better about the situation. 

That moment in Atlanta was small. But I see it play out every day in the work I do, usually when the stakes are higher and the fallout is more damaging. 

It’s so easy to blame. There’s a sense of relief that comes when you identify something other than yourself as the problem. The pressure lessens, and we feel a sense of validation that we are the ‘good guy’ in the story; we aren’t the problem. 

You don’t have to do anything when the problem is something or someone else. Of course, that relief comes at a cost. You lose the ability to make it better. If you don’t own the problem, you can’t own the solution either. It implies helplessness. And sometimes its very subtle, like those thoughts running through my head at the airport. 

A story you tell yourself about why things are the way they are, why your numbers are down, why the relationship isn't working, why you haven't made the change you keep saying you're going to make. The story sounds like an explanation. It functions like a cage.

Accountability takes radical honesty, and that means even when something is genuinely not your fault (that’s real sometimes), you still have a choice about what you are going to do about it. Personal accountability isn’t about fault. It doesn’t care about who or what caused the problem or who deserves to be held responsible in some cosmic sense of judgment. 

Personal accountability is more practical and ultimately way more powerful. It’s about your ability to choose how you engage with the situation you find yourself in. And that ability doesn’t disappear just because someone else created the situation. It’s always there. Blame can make you forget that you still have agency.

I work with professionals who are running their own lanes — real estate agents, sales professionals, advisors, leaders of all kinds. And one of the most common patterns I see is smart, capable people who have talked themselves into a corner using a perfectly logical explanation for why things aren't working.

The market. The economy. The manager. The team. The timing.

Some of those explanations are accurate. That's what makes this hard.

But accurate and useful are two different things. You can be completely right about why something happened and still be stuck, because being right about the cause doesn't move you forward. Taking ownership of what happens next does.

This is the core of what I call getting straight with yourself. Not self-blame — that's just blame pointed inward, and it's equally useless. Getting straight with yourself means being honest enough to ask: regardless of how I got here, what am I going to do about it? What choice do I have right now that I haven't been willing to make?

That question is where things start to change.

That day at the airport, some folks weren’t able to move past that blame. They got increasingly angry. They made a scene. Created friction. Put people on the defensive and had several others feeling uncomfortable and not thinking friendly thoughts about them. That is generally not how we say we want to show up.

Blame will always be available to you. It will always feel justified, at least partially. The situations that invite it are real. But every moment you spend in blame is a moment you're not spending on the only thing that actually moves your life forward — deciding what you're going to do next.

Things will happen. They always do. The question is what you're going to do when they do.

Consider your life. Be on purpose.

Jennifer Looking for something a little more RAW ? Watch below...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQPB9fHkHxY