Remember the game “hot potato” that you played as a kid? Blame is like that. No one wants to be left holding it, since you might get burned. As a result, we develop explanations for the innocence someone else will hopefully connect to us. You or a child you work with may have “reasons” for not having an assignment completed. “The dog ate my homework” comes to mind.

The Passive Voice: “Not Me”.............Hear, Speak, See No Evil

A key aspect of excuse-making is assigning control of the situation to extrinsic factors, thus shifting blame and, sometimes as a bonus, reframing oneself as a victim. This is short-term gain: It appears to solve a problem now, but does not deal with the actual one(s), or it creates new ones. A teacher who says, “The students didn’t follow the directions” has passed the blame as adeptly as the student who says, “We weren’t warned that there would be short answer questions mixed in with the multiple choice.”  The teacher has missed the opportunity to examine the way directions are worded and the student has missed the chance to reflect on study strategies and comprehension of content. In this way it is possible to pass both the blame and the guilt with no resulting gain.

Why You May Need to Disbar Your Internal Lawyer

While reframing is often the best way to get out of your own way, the blame “reflex” may be preventing you from a necessary change.  Stop defending yourself; failing to accept responsibility keeps us from being able to change habits that impede our personal, academic and professional growth. Whether you are trying to change yourself or someone else (see Part I of this series, Turning around the Hidden Power of Blame), you already know that it’s very difficult.

According to William James, three things need to be engaged for us to change: attention, habit and will. In other words, you need to notice what you are doing in order to stop doing it so much; you need to develop an alternate and more effective habit; and you need to develop staying power (often “won’t” as opposed to “will” power).

Cultivating Mental Balance

If you’re ready to swap blame for attention, habit and will, here are some Positive Psychology tools to help you.

• First, notice how often you find that you blame “circumstances” like the weather, as opposed to other people, for your inability to have more of what you want. You can’t change some things in your life, but you can nearly always change your response and attention to them, whether things or people.

• Next, you need to attend to the habits of mind that are reinforcing your resistance to change and create new ones.

• Finally, you will need to have the will to stick with an empirically-based coaching program. Note that you may want the nudge of someone besides the face you see in the mirror.

Sometimes you will need to stick with a program much longer than the six weeks it was tested and shown to have correlations to improved well-being.