Did you know that saying “It’s not my fault?” is one of the destructive things you can do to your own future?

Whenever we react to a problem by saying (or thinking) “it’s not my fault!” — or something like it. You are likely doing major damage to your own potential. In fact, there are three major downsides to blame. Want to know what those are? Get ready to find out. 

Blame, or the assigning responsibility of a wrong to another person when you were involved in some way, is one of the most disempowering things you can do. Blame is toxic to your success. Why? It’s simple. Blame shifts the attention away from yourself to someone else. And when you do that, you transfer your mental energy away from the part you played in the problem. When someone else is at fault why worry about how you could have improved that situation?

Now before we go too far down this blame black hole, I want to make something clear. There are some things that really are not your fault. Things like what happened in the stock market last month, decisions your parents made before you were born, or the car jacking on the other side of the country today. There are some things where you’re genuinely not at fault. When I’m talking about blame, I’m not talking about those things. 

What I am referring to are those arguments, problems, and issues where you played a role in some way. Shifting blame to other people where you had something to do with it (and them doing it back to you): that is the blame game.  And as Bob Proctor once said, “no one wins the blame game.”

Common Examples of Blame

Maybe you don’t think you’re a blamer. Maybe you’re not — or maybe you are and just don’t realize just how far the rot goes. Here are a few examples of blame that you may identify with (Source: Abate Counseling):

• “The teacher sucked…that’s why I failed the test.”
• “A woman blamed the butcher for selling beef that was always full of fat. But it was really her problem: she could have paid more for leaner meat or gone to a different grocery store.”
• “My mother didn’t drive me to work so I got fired for missing days.”
• “The policeman was so annoying, I was going to get that light fixed eventually.”
• “If Starbucks wouldn’t have had such a long line, I wouldn’t have been late for work.”

Starbucks, really? You can’t look at a clock? On your phone? Right above Instagram where you were scrolling standing in line?

Blame is insidious. It looks at a problem in your life and then looks for a way out of responsibility. It searches for an explanation where you’re off the hook and someone else takes the fall. 

Three Downsides to Blame

There are three major downsides to blame that could be toxic to your success. These are three reasons you should avoid blame when you’re involved in a situation that didn’t turn out so well. 

#1: Blame gives you an unfair assessment of the actual problem. Think about it like this. You and your spouse are arguing about money. You’re frugal and trying to be responsible with bills, savings, debt snowball, or whatever — and your wife is spending money like a drunken sailor. Or so it seems. You default to blame, you say she’s irresponsible all the while ignoring your potential part in this problem. Maybe you’re always working. Maybe she feels alone. Maybe she wants to feel validated and buying things helps her with that. But because you’re ignoring her and blaming her, your attention has already moved on. In your mind, she’s at fault and that’s the problem. 

Consider this possibility. If there’s a chance that a problem could be partitioned off into percentages and she’s 80% responsible for the problem and you’re only 20% of the problem. Then guess what, you are 100% responsible for 20% of this problem. She doesn’t share any part of your 20%. Changes the game, doesn’t it? Especially if that 20% was the linchpin for helping fix her 80%. See how that works. By taking responsibility, you encourage a more honest assessment about the problem. Especially your contribution to it. And if fixing you’re 20% of the problem fixes the money issue in your marriage — then you just won by refusing to blame. 

Once again, blame gives you an unfair assessment of the actual problem  

#2 Blame generates a toxic culture wherever you are. Blame begets blame. Whether you’re blaming your co-worker for missing that deadline or your kids for not picking up their clothes strewn about for the 29th time (maybe they need a different approach to training), blame contributes to toxicity wherever you go. And the higher up you are in the organization, the more you insert poison into your culture through blame: be it at home, at work, or in social situations. 

Leadership expert Gordon Tredgold writes, “Leadership defines culture and if leaders are quick to blame others…the team will very quickly jump on this bandwagon, often using the opportunity to cover up their own mistakes by pointing their fingers at others. This creates an atmosphere of fear and distrust which ultimately creates a toxic environment.” 

And all that toxicity comes from what? Blame. Blame turns a happy home into a noxious waste dump. Blame turns a healthy work culture into a deadly relationship minefield. You may have seen this before. In fact, you may be living in it right now. And a toxic culture is not a great environment for you to flourish in.   

Again, blame generates a toxic culture wherever you are. 

#3 Blame turns you into a victim. This is probably the worst downside to blame. Blame is disempowering. It steals your ability to think about your contribution to problems. Blame says someone hurt me and someone messed up. All of a sudden you’re the martyr. You’re the victim in a contrived story where your boss, your co-worker, your spouse, your kid, your whatever is the mean, nasty villain who just ruined your day. How sad?

A few years ago, I bought a house to flip. My goal was to purchase an undervalued home, fix it up, then sell it for a quick $20 – 30,000 in profit. Simple right? Except I’d never done it before and I knew very little about real estate. It didn’t work out, to say the least. Almost from the moment I paid the down payment on the house bad things started happening. The appraisal didn’t come through right, the contractor was later than I expected, everything cost more than I thought. And come time to sell, nobody wanted to buy at my target price. The whole plan was crumbling along with my hopes for a quick $20K. Suffice to say, I didn’t make that profit. In fact, that project put me in debt that I had never been in before – plus some meager retirement was gone. What do you think I did? I found a scapegoat. My realtor.

She was a flipper so I thought she would know. She overvalued the home – by like $40K. That was my margin and my real estate commissions. Maybe she could have done the project and made money. Maybe. But instead she stuck me with the biggest financial blunder of my life. Blame. That made me feel better. But it just wasn’t true.

The fact is, I’m the one who followed through on this project. I’m the one who wrote the checks. I’m the one who didn’t check her numbers, and I’m the one whose name was on the contracts. It was my fault – at least primarily. The whole thing took about 16 months from start to finish. I took the hit, walked away, and decided to change my approach. I stopped blaming the realtor and put some changes in place. One thing that really helped was I got a Dave Ramsey financial coach and in about 19 months, I was out of debt.

Had I just stewed over my realtor? Had I hired a lawyer and tried to sue her for whatever I would have spent all my energy on self-pity, regret, and bitterness instead of focusing my attention where I did have more control. Blame could have been my path to prison. But taking responsibility was my path to freedom.

Biblical Source of Blame: Eve, Adam, and the Serpent

Blame is nothing new. In fact, it’s almost as old as creation. In the garden, Eve and a serpent were having a conversation about a tree, a fruit, and a lie about God’s goodness. You know the story. Eve ate the fruit. Adam ate it after her, and sin entered the world. God shows up a little later and asks Adam if he ate the fruit. What did he say? 

“The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:12) Next comes Eve. When God asked her about the fruit, Eve said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” (Genesis 3:13). The blame game started right after the first sin. A shirking of responsibility in the 3rd chapter of the Bible. Blame is nothing new. It’s an ancient game that we all love to play. 

Takeaway: Anti-Blame is the Key to Your Success    

I said it before but it bears repeating a hundred times: blame may be causing you to throw away the key to your own success. It’s toxic to your success. Because the key to your success is actually anti-blame: it’s called responsibility. When you take responsibility for whatever part you play in a problem, you are seizing back control of what you can affect.