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One of the fundamental distinctions between blame and responsibility is the kind of game each creates.
Blame is a zero-sum game. If I screwed up, that means you didn’t, and vice versa.
The entire context is one in which there’s a finite amount of fault, and the goal is to get as much of it off of you and onto someone else. This is why people who’ve been raised in a blame-based culture tend to default to blaming others.
It’s not because they’re jerks — it’s because they learned, innocently, that the more blame they hold, the worse things are for them. So naturally, their orientation becomes: how do I put as much of this hot potato onto someone else before the music stops?
That’s the blame game. It’s baked into our culture. It’s the water we swim in. And it’s zero-sum: one person wins, the other loses. That’s the nature of the game.
Responsibility, on the other hand, is not a zero-sum game. The amount of responsibility I take on doesn’t take anything away from the responsibility you could take. We could both take 100% responsibility for the exact same interaction. In fact, that’s often what the practice of leadership asks of us.
This concept runs counter to how most of us have been trained to think. If I take responsibility, that’ll let you off the hook. If I take more on, I’ll get less justice, less resolution, and you’ll get away with it. And if you’ve lived in the world of blame, all of that makes sense. The logic is internally consistent. But that’s because the logic is coming from inside a broken model.
This is the first barrier to shifting into a context of leadership. When you’ve been trained in blame, taking responsibility doesn’t just look crazy — it looks dangerous. It seems like it’s going to make things worse, not better.
It’s important to note that this conversation isn’t for the context of trauma, healing, or therapy. If you’ve been harmed or are in a process of recovery, great, that’s its own valid and necessary conversation.
This isn’t that. This is a leadership conversation. A transformational conversation. A conversation where we’re willing to stand in the possibility that everyone in the relationship is whole and fully functioning. They might be irritating or annoying, but they’re not broken.
From there, something radical becomes possible: in every interaction, you always have access to taking 100% responsibility for how it went.
And here’s the thing: the more responsibility you take from this place, the more possibility opens up. You start to see how you contributed to the situation. What you did or didn’t do that helped create it. And once you can see that, you have a new choice available next time. You gain access to more of your power, not by forcing the world to bend to your will, but by seeing yourself as a creator in it.
None of this is available in the blame game. In blame, power is lost the moment you take anything on, so all you can really do is avoid. Avoid that person. Avoid that situation. Avoid that energy. You slowly contract your life into something small, safe, and totally in your control. But also a life that is isolated, lonely, and devoid of real power.
That’s the ultimate cost of blame. It might seem protective, but it’s a trap. It keeps you powerless, and over time, it calcifies into a story of victimhood. You’ll keep finding yourself saying, “This isn’t my fault,” and yet somehow, life keeps handing you the same outcomes.
That’s not a coincidence. That’s the nature of the game.
So if you want something different, it starts by playing a different game.