Onus

The word "onus" can be hyphenated to "on-us." It's a mini lesson in behavior.

Grasshopper Notes are the writings from America's Best Known Hypnotherapist John Morgan. His podcasts contain his most responded to essays and blog posts from the past two decades. 

Find the written versions of these podcasts on John's podcasting site: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1628038

"The Grasshopper" is the part of you that whispers pearls of wisdom that  seem to pop into your mind from out of the blue. John's essays and blog posts are his interpretations of these "Nips of Nectar." Others have labeled his writings as timeless wisdom. 

Most of the John's writings revolve around self improvement and self help. They address topics like:

• Mindfulness
• Peace of mind
• Creativity
• How to stay in the present moment
• Spirituality
• Behavior improvement

And stories that transform you to a wider sense of awareness that presents more options. And isn't that what we all want, more options? 

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Transcript

Onus

It struck me one day that the word “Onus” can be hyphenated to read: “on-us.”

I laughed when I realized how often we twist that word to suit our purposes. It seems we want to spread the responsibility when things go awry and often claim full credit when they go swimmingly.

It’s on-us when we do well, and on anybody but us when we don’t.

Here is a piece of wisdom from The Grasshopper that will save us all from the practice of spreading the poverty around: “Your behavior is your behavior and no amount of burden shifting can explain it away.”

Simply stated, your behavior is “on-you.” Think of it as a French word that means “total responsibility for your behavior.”

Behavior is, more often than not, programmed. That means we learned it along the way. We weren’t born with it; we acquired it.

Many of us, when we don’t like the way we behave, have learned to shift the burden to avoid the responsibility for our actions.

Take the toddler being potty trained as an example. The child knows after several training sessions that the goal is to make it to the potty when they have that urge. When they don’t feel like making it to the potty, they do their business wherever they sit. When their behavior is discovered, they may offer up that they “tried” to make it to the bathroom. We learn at an early age that “try” absolves us from behavior.

We have shifted the onus of our behavior to a word that has no behavior attached – "Try." That pattern of learned behavior follows us through life as we continue the practice, if you’ll excuse the expression, of spreading the shit around.

Try attempts to shift the burden from “on-you” to “on-us.” “Us,” in this case, means “not you.”

Our behavior makes up our life. Explaining away or ignoring our behavior has become our national pastime. We spend our time explaining away what we did rather than focusing on what can be done.

We do what we do. I hope you heard the period at the end of that sentence. The more time you take to blame and explain, the less time you have to take dead aim on adjusting your behavior.

Noticing and taking full responsibility for what we do puts us on a path towards something new. It puts the onus on you to outgrow explaining away everything that you do.

All the best,

John