Throughout our lives we are constantly told that you can change.
You can change your thinking.
You can change your behaviour.
You can make better choices.
You can change your life.
Yet there is a question hidden within all these statements that is rarely asked:
Who is the “You” being spoken to?
If our thoughts can be observed, who is observing them?
If our beliefs can be questioned, who is questioning them?
If our automatic responses can be changed, who is deciding that they should change?
And if our brain can learn to respond differently, who is taking responsibility for teaching it?
Perhaps there are two different meanings contained within the word you.
The small-y “you”
From the moment we enter the world we begin experiencing it.
Through parents, family, education, relationships, culture, success, failure, love, rejection, fear, encouragement and countless other experiences, we develop beliefs about ourselves and the world around us.
Those beliefs influence our perspective.
Our perspective influences the choices that appear reasonable to us.
And through repetition, many of those choices and responses become increasingly automatic.
This accumulated, conditioned person might be described as you with a small y.
It is the person we have learned to become.
This does not make small-y you wrong or defective. Much of this learning was necessary. It helped us understand and navigate the world as we experienced it.
And, assuming no malice, the people who influenced us were themselves doing the best they could from their knowledge, understanding, experience and programming at the time.
Understanding this therefore creates no need for blame.
Neither them nor us.
But something important happens when we begin to recognise that some of what we have always assumed to be who we are may actually be what we have learned to be.
Taking Responsibility
This is where responsibility becomes fundamental.
Responsibility does not mean blame.
Nor does taking responsibility mean pretending that we consciously understood why we made every choice in our past.
It means accepting that they were nevertheless our choices.
Some were conscious.
Many were automatic.
Some emerged from beliefs and patterns established long before we understood that they existed.
But unconscious does not mean they were not ours.
Taking full responsibility allows us to look backwards without looking for someone to blame.
Instead, we can become curious.
Why did I repeatedly make that choice?
What belief made that choice appear reasonable?
Where did that belief come from?
What experience taught me to believe it?
Was it helpful then?
Is it helpful now?
And perhaps most importantly:
Is it actually what I believe — or simply what I learned to believe?
Our past choices therefore become information.
Rather than evidence for prosecution, they become evidence for understanding.
Blame looks backwards to find fault.
Responsibility can look backwards to find understanding and forwards to make a better choice.
Discovering “You”
And this brings us back to the original question.
Who is asking those questions?
Something within the human being appears capable of observing the thoughts, beliefs, assumptions and automatic responses that have accumulated through experience.
Something can become aware of the programming without necessarily remaining obedient to it.
That is what I am describing as You, with a capital Y.
Perhaps You is our consciousness.
Perhaps it is what some would call the higher self, authentic self or observing self.
Perhaps it is an expression of Human Agency.
The name matters less at this stage than recognising the phenomenon.
You can observe you.
Capital-Y You can observe small-y you thinking, fearing, reacting, seeking approval, defending, withdrawing, pleasing, judging or repeating familiar patterns.
And in that moment of awareness, something extraordinary becomes possible.
Choice.
Discovering What Is Truly Ours
Taking responsibility therefore offers something even greater than improving our behaviour.
It provides a way of discovering who we actually are beneath what experience has taught us to become.
We can begin separating identity from programming.
“I am a people pleaser” can become:
“I learned that pleasing people was a way of receiving love.”
“I am frightened of confrontation” can become:
“I learned that avoiding confrontation helped keep me safe.”
“I need other people’s approval” can become:
“I learned to associate approval with my value.”
Once something previously experienced as identity is recognised as learned behaviour, it becomes available for examination.
And then capital-Y You can ask:
Do I choose to continue believing this?
This does not necessarily mean that somewhere beneath all our experience lies a completely predetermined personality waiting to be uncovered.
Perhaps discovering the real You is partly discovery and partly creation.
By examining what has been programmed into us, we begin to discover what feels genuinely ours: our values, dispositions, curiosities, capacities and perhaps our underlying gist.
We begin discovering who You is partly by discovering who You is not.
From Reaction to Human Agency
The distinction can therefore be expressed simply.
Small-y you is substantially the person experience has helped create.
Capital-Y You is the capacity to become aware of that person, take responsibility for that person’s choices, understand how those choices came about and consciously influence what happens next.
This is where responsibility becomes Response-Ability.
We cannot change the experiences that programmed many of our original responses.
We do not need to blame the people through whom that programming occurred.
We do not need to blame ourselves for not previously understanding what we had not yet learned to see.
But once we become aware, we possess something enormously important:
the possibility of choice.
Through repeated conscious choices, we can develop our ability to respond differently.
What initially requires awareness and conscious effort can, through learning and repetition, become a different and more helpful response.
We are no longer simply asking:
What has life programmed me to do?
We can begin asking:
What does You choose to do?
Perhaps This Is What Freedom Means
Freedom cannot mean freedom from influence.
Every human being is influenced by experience.
Nor can freedom mean control over everything that happens to us.
Reality exists independently of our wishes.
Perhaps human freedom begins somewhere much closer to home.
It begins when we recognise that the person we have become does not have to determine completely the person we become next.
We accept responsibility for the choices we have made without blame.
We seek to understand what produced them.
We discover the beliefs and programming beneath them.
We decide consciously what we wish to retain and what no longer serves us.
And through doing so, we gradually improve our Response-Ability and exercise our Human Agency more intentionally.
Perhaps, then, the journey towards a fuller life is not primarily about becoming somebody else.
It is about discovering You beneath you.
The you shaped by everything that has happened.
And the You capable of deciding what happens next.
Perhaps that is why responsibility creates freedom.
Because until we accept ownership of our choices, we have little reason to investigate what has been choosing through us.
But once we do, the question changes.
Not:
“Who made me this way?”
But:
“What made me choose this way, what can I learn from it, and what does the real You choose now?”
That may be where Human Agency truly begins.
And perhaps the lifelong development of Response-Ability is how You increasingly becomes the author of you.