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How and Why to Stop Blaming Others and Start Living the Life You Want

Barb Nangle
4 min readOct 18, 2024

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Photo Credit: Blameave Calvar

If other people are to blame for everything that’s wrong in your life, you’re screwed! That would mean you have no options. I don’t believe that. When we realize that others are not to blame for the difficulties of our lives, we can take responsibility for making changes in our lives.

This doesn’t mean nobody ever did anything to you that was harmful. It means that if you focus entirely on what other people or society did to you, you’re never going to try to make any changes because you’re acting like you don’t have options. Staying in blame is like acting as if your fate has been sealed. But you actually DO have options.

Here are a couple of famous examples from people in history who were horribly harmed, yet chose not to blame but instead to focus on what they COULD do.

Nelson Mandela

He was in prison for 27 years of hard labor, tortured, and treated horribly. He could have spent all that time in resentment and blame toward his captors, yet he chose to see his them as human. And he chose to use all that energy he would have been expending in blame and resentment toward his efforts to develop himself spiritually. He went on to become the first elected president of South Africa from 1994–99.

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Barb Nangle
Barb Nangle

Written by Barb Nangle

I’m a boundaries coach who works with women who focus on what others think and neglect themselves. I've coached hundreds using my exclusive BUILD framework.

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