Senior Coach, Conscious Leadership Group
Think about the last time you walked out of a meeting tense and couldn’t say exactly why. Chances are it was fear. Every workplace is full of it, and it rarely gets named. It shows up as the question nobody asks, the decision that drags on for weeks, the feedback that never gets given. Leaders think they’re at work to solve problems and manage people. Much of what they’re actually doing is managing fear – their own and everyone else’s.
Why so much fear? Because the things we care about most at work (our livelihood, our standing, our sense of whether we’re any good) depend on people we don’t control. A boss can cut the budget. A colleague can drop the ball. A client can leave. Our outcomes sit in other people’s hands, and some part of us always knows it.
So when we’re scared, we do what humans do. We blame. We sense a threat and the ego finds someone to point at in milliseconds. It feels like protection. It isn’t. The moment I decide you’re the reason for my experience, I’ve also decided you’re the one who has to change it. I’ve put my freedom in your hands and called it being right. That’s the cost nobody counts. Blame feels like strength and works like surrender.
This article asks one question: How are you trading your freedom for blame? Before I ask it of you, let me show you what the trade cost me.
My Own Blame Story
Early in my HR career, I took a job at a company whose mission I believed in. The work mattered, I was learning fast, and within a year I felt a loyalty to the business and its leaders that I hadn’t felt anywhere before.
Then, a new leader was hired to run my organization. A few months in, I reached a conclusion: She was wrong for the business and wrong for the culture. She doesn’t get it, I told myself. She’s going to ruin this. That was my fear talking, but I didn’t yet have the awareness to notice it, let alone work with it.
When I look back at why I was so scared of the new leader, the answer is clear: I’d tied my sense of the future to this company, and a stranger had arrived who might take it somewhere I didn’t want it to go. She was unknown, untested, and not yet trustworthy to me. The fear wanted someone to blame, and my finger pointed at her. The threat had a name and a face. From then on I didn’t have to feel scared. I could blame instead, and I got to be right about her.
Once fear and blame took hold, I began to undermine her. Nothing dramatic, but enough. When I saw she needed help, I went out of my way not to offer it. I recruited others to my view so we could stand together in a shared alliance of victimhood. I told myself I was doing the right thing, that her behavior left me no choice. In the story I was telling myself, I was the hero saving the company, and heroes don’t have to look at their own conduct.
Looking back, it’s my greatest professional regret. Not because I disagreed with her, or with the way she wanted to lead. People disagree with their leaders all the time. It’s that I let myself believe she was solely responsible for the fate of the company, and I spent my time and energy blaming her for getting it wrong while feeling righteous about it. That was the invisible trade. By putting the cause and control of everything on her, I gave up my own freedom and agency. I became the victim, she became the villain, and I felt trapped, disempowered, and drained.
The Deception of Blame
When something goes wrong, it’s easy to say the trouble is over there. Pointing at someone else has an instant payoff. We get to be right, and everyone loves being right. The body reads “I found the problem” as “I’m safe,” and I get a small rush of righteousness on top. Blame feels good. Temporarily. That’s the key word.
Here’s the deception. Blame doesn’t resolve the fear. It covers it. The fear keeps running underneath, so we reach for blame again, and each time we settle a little deeper below the line, defending a position instead of learning. It feels like standing up for ourselves. It’s actually a way of staying scared, and staying in victim consciousness.
This is where we practice 100% responsibility at CLG. Responsibility starts with noticing when we’ve slipped into a victim mindset, feeling at the effect of our relationships or our circumstances. We look at who and what we’re blaming.
The economy is bad. My colleague isn’t pulling their weight. My schedule is brutal. All of it can be true.
But the moment I decide that’s why I feel the way I feel, I’ve handed my freedom away. If the cause of my experience lives outside me, so does my ability to change it. Each of them now holds the keys to my experience instead of me.
Responsibility is the shift back. We pause when we notice we’re blaming. We get curious about how we might be co-creating what’s in front of us. And we put our attention on what’s actually within our control. We shift from being at the effect of other people and circumstances to being the creators of our experience.
The Same Story, Twenty Years Later
That first story is from early in my career. I’d like to tell you I stopped blaming after that, when in reality, I’m human, and I didn’t. Reactivity and blame come back again and again, in different forms.
A few years ago, a client of mine kept canceling our sessions. I told myself it was a discipline problem. She wasn’t committed. She wasn’t prioritizing the work. She’d get serious when she was ready. I made her the difficult client, and I was so sure of that story that I never got curious about what she might be protecting.
There are real differences from the first story. No undermining this time, no recruiting allies. But look closer and it’s the same move in a different disguise. Something was going wrong in work I cared about, I got scared, and I made someone else the problem. A name and a face outside of me, so I could be right and didn’t have to feel my fear.
Months later, my client told me the real reason. She’d been afraid to walk into the room and say the coaching wasn’t landing for her. I’m grateful she did. Blaming her had created a block, in the relationship and in my own growth. It allowed me to skip my own fear, and the harder question my fear was pointing to: How was I co-creating this situation, and what could I learn from it?
What Blame Really Costs Us
That’s the cost of blame. Doors stay closed. Curiosity shrinks, and so does our capacity for learning, growth, and connection. And the conversations that could propel us forward never happen. They don’t stand a chance.
The pattern in both stories is the same: By deciding the problem was someone else, I’d also decided there was nothing for me to look at, nothing to try, nothing to shift. I made them wrong so I could be right, and that created a blind spot around my own part. I wasn’t available for learning, and the problem persisted. Practicing 100% responsibility would have looked different.
With my boss, I could have offered the help I was withholding, or given her the feedback I was so freely giving everyone else about her. I could have told her I was scared about where the company was headed, and found out whether she was too. I’ll never know what that conversation would have opened, or what we could have created together, because I never had it.
With my client, I could have asked Is this working for you? Here’s the story I’m making up, and I’d love to hear yours. Once I could see my part, I could change my part. That’s the freedom and self-authorship blame takes, and it’s the freedom every leader I work with yearns for.
Responsibility starts with a willingness to stay. To notice that when I’m blaming, I’m probably scared, and to stay with the fear instead of locating the problem outside myself. From there I get to ask: How am I co-creating this, and what’s within my control?
So look at your own week. Who are you blaming, and what do you want to be right about? There’s likely fear underneath it. And there may be a far more powerful way for you to move through the world that you haven’t yet claimed.
A Practice for Taking Your Freedom Back
Blame is a reflex, so the work isn’t to stop having it. The work is to catch it a little sooner and make one different choice.
- Recognize it’s happening. Catch the “because of them” sentence as it forms, or the finger starting to point, or the tightening in your chest right before it. You don’t have to fix anything yet. Just say, There it is. I’m blaming.
- Hold it lightly. Don’t blame or shame yourself for blaming. That just keeps the cycle going. Let it be no big deal. You’re a human being with a nervous system doing its job.
- Choose responsibility. Ask yourself: If I weren’t blaming, how might I be co-creating this? What am I doing, not doing, believing, or assuming that’s shaping this experience? Get curious.
- Notice what happens. Check how you feel after the shift from blame to responsibility. Most of my clients describe it as lightness. Freedom. That’s the trade running the other way.
And be patient with yourself. These patterns are old, and they will keep showing up, sometimes in the same week you thought you’d moved past them. That isn’t a sign of failure. It’s simply what practice looks like. None of us will ever stop blaming entirely, because we’re human and our nervous systems are built for it. What changes with awareness is how long we stay there. For me, every time I catch the reflex and trade blame for responsibility, I get a little of my freedom back, and I learn something about myself that I couldn’t have learned any other way.
So I’ll leave you where I started. How are you trading your freedom for blame? And what would you get back if you stopped?
Moving from blame to responsibility is an ongoing practice, and you don’t have to do it alone. Explore our full calendar of upcoming events to find opportunities to deepen your conscious leadership practice alongside others who are learning, too.
