Personal Responsibility as a Development Tool
Arquímedes Cedeño
University of Phoenix, Puerto Rico Campus
GEN/200
February 14, 2012
Lic. Lopez-Rivera

Personal Responsibility as a Development Tool
In the society, the persons require a high degree of personal responsibility to be considered as a successful person in life. If they want to be successful must take responsibility as a habit necessary to create, without it, they are predetermined to fail.
As Tracy says in his study:
The more responsibility you take, the more in control you are. And the freer you are, especially in your own mind, to make decisions and to do the things you want to do. So there’s a direct relationship between responsibility, control, freedom and happiness. The happiest people in the world are those who feel absolutely terrific about themselves, and this is the natural outgrowth of accepting total responsibility for every part of their lives (p. 1).
What is Personal Responsibility?
Personal responsibility is the ability to determine one’s own decisions, choices, and actions (What is personal responsibility?, 2012). Are those actions that help us improve our quality of life, our relationship with people and the environment around us. Complying with the rules imposed by our society and enforces them through the rest of it.
Responsibility is not a burden, it's a blessing (Gallozzi, 2012) How we acquired it?
We acquired it through the teaching of our parents, early education. Those little details learned from childhood, is sow in us the basis of an education centered on the principles of the family. Through the example of the consequences, which are creating our actions and how the people are rewarded - or condemn us - by performing it.
How do we develop it?
In the course of our lives, we are developing many virtues through our own experiences. One of these virtues is the ability to discern between good and bad, based on the model of education received. As well as this virtue, personal responsibility develops through our experiences, our experiences (good and bad) and our desire for improvement. This helps us in the process of creating a solid foundation for the development of personal responsibility.
Personal responsibility as a basis for success
There is a straight line between responsibility and success (academic, professional, and personal). As we fulfill our responsibilities will increase our achievements and our successes as well as the people’s personal satisfaction is rewarded for their work and awards received and best of all, the feeling of fulfilled the task assigned with fully and professionalism. Is doing the right things and doing them right (Tools for Success, 2012).
How can we help improve our performance?
Personal responsibility is one base to achieve our goals in the different stages of our lives. As we will develop, we begin to be better students, better professionals, and better people. Among our performance and our personal responsibility, there is a direct relationship. As it increases our personal responsibility, it improves our personal performance. To achieve this development we must take into account two factors: the practice and discipline.

Practice.
As in all areas of life, the practice leads to perfection and the practice of personal responsibility is no exception. We must be consistent with this quality to make it an integral part of our lives, of our daily routine; in short that is part of our moral and ethical principle.
Discipline.
We should note that we can develop a personal characteristic if we choose to do it. We have to do our part to manage the development of our responsibility, draw us achievable goals and credible to help us to move toward our personal development, to help us overcome the obstacles that we go occurring on the way to achieve our cherished goal: success.
The long road to develop it
We should start from children, taking the consequences of our actions, searching for the good side of mistakes and learn from them as well, we will be creating the basis to be better people, better students, better parents, and better children.
Maintaining personal responsibility
We must always be the most responsible way possible because our success depends on it (personal, academic, and labor). If we do not possess this quality, our journey through life, by the houses of studies, and the workplace will be well be difficult because we will be at a disadvantage with other competitors. We must use tools that help us to maintain and improve our personal responsibility as the best weapon for our development. Tools to success.
One way to accomplish big things in life is to make big promise. (Ellis, 2010) . To improve our personal responsibility, we have available a large amount of very useful tools, if we know how to use them. These tools range from planning of the time, to the layout of the short and long-term goals, passing by a without number of options more; that they will go to shaping our attitude until that responsibility is part of our lives in everything we do
Best practices.
Much has been written about best practices to be used for the development of personal responsibility. Personally, I think the better practice is the reward. One must reward for each personal achievement for every obstacle overcome by each gained promotion. Finally, celebrate the fruits of personal responsibility and enjoy the moment.

Conclusion
In our daily lives, we face situations that require us to discern about our values, to face what we take for real, and we face challenges that we see unreachable. These situations are generally seen as barriers between us and the success, but with the help of one of our qualities - Personal responsibility – We can be the successful person whom we want. To do so we must devise a plan in which we are translating our progress, our expectations, and our goals; as well as the estimated time in achieving the tasks or goals.
At the personal level, I have created a plan to practice responsibility in this new stage of student and it includes the following (among others): * Book a day of the week (Wednesday) to validate the assignments for the next week. * Download all the material required for the class so that it can be available even when disconnected from the Internet. * Read the assigned material at least one week before class to participate in class discussions. * Do in the morning most of my work assignments to leave office earlier and be on time to the classroom. * Go to the website of UOPX to familiarize myself with all the available tools. * Read the APA Style Manual.

Bibliography
Tools for Success. (2012, February 11). Retrieved February 11, 2012, from Cass Business School Web SIte: http://www.cass.city.ac.uk/research-and-faculty/centres/cass-centre-for-charity-effectiveness/tools-for-success
What is personal responsibility? (2012, February 11). Retrieved February 11, 2012, from Avatar Web Site: http://www.avatarpacific.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=149&catid=94&Itemid=332
Ellis, D. (2010). Becoming a Master Student. Cengage Learning.
Gallozzi, C. (2012, March 05). Personal Responsability. Retrieved from www.personal-development.com: http://www.personal-development.com/chuck/responsibility.htm
Tracy, B. (2012, March 5). Taking Personal Responsability. Retrieved from SuccessMethods.org: http://www.successmethods.org/brian_tracy-a19.html