You’re not grown up until you know how to communicate, apologize, be truthful and accept accountability without blaming someone else.

Do you accept responsibility for your actions and behaviors?

And if you do, are you willing to acquiesce that there are mistakes that you have made that may have caused irreparable harm as a result of your unwillingness to accept these responsibilities in the past and own them as your issues to be processed… and subsequently dealt with?

If we are truthful in our continuous approach to how we ought to be behaving and to all of our decisions being subject to other people’s perceptions, we are all the weaker for our not having been willing to acknowledge these problems and own them.

It is only through our continued growth in this regard that we ultimately mature, become adults, and subsequently tackle the much bigger issues in our world.

If you are not willing or capable of accepting your direct responsibility or partial responsibility for events that may have transpired, you are going to continuously be living life in a permanent state of imbalance, in the sense that you will continue to shirk the responsibility that was yours, and as a direct consequence, you will fail to have the proper growth that comes from having accepted such responsibility and making the necessary reparations or amends.

It is only through our continuous desire to improve and mature that we evolve eventually into the people we wish to become.

Continuous growth cycles enable us to come face-to-face with our weakest qualities, and to recognize the parts that we must play in improving ourselves to ensure those weaker qualities diminish in favor of greater strength.

Ultimately, this greater strength may only develop when we have matured through the earlier chapters that were dragging us down.

Learning the advanced art of communication requires discipline, humility, strength, patience, tolerance and above all else, maturity. When you can own your mistake, and immediately take responsibility for it, and be genuinely willing to make the proper reparations, only then are you on the genuine path of “growing up.”

As Graham Nash once said, “A man’s man who looks a man right between the eyes.“

Happy Wednesday!