The event was promising.

If done right, it could potentially be a nationwide or even an international sensation.

And I had assembled a very competent team of five to make it happen.

We only had four months and an extremely meagre budget. But we managed to pool all our resources together to make it happen.

This was my first time organizing an event, let alone one that attracted hundreds of students from several schools.

But after the event was over, I was left with a bittersweet taste in my mouth.

Not many people showed up as we expected.

There was intense tension between members of the organizing team.

And plans for an even bigger sequel never materialized.

Despite my friends telling me it was a success, I saw it as a personal failure.

Recently I recalled this event with my best friend Kin, who was also part of the team for that event.

Unlike me, he had a very different recollection of the event. A more positive one.

I lamented to him about how I refused to believe the event was a ‘success’.

Kin only had one question for me: “When are you going to own your result?”

And I was struck silent.

I didn’t answer him. Because I knew what I needed to do.

I needed to just fully accept… no… OWN the outcome.

As an ambitious perfectionist who sets such high expectations for himself, it was a concept that I still needed to learn.

Learn, understand and internalize.

It was more than just about accepting responsibility for my past.

It was about fully owning every aspect of it – the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Power of Full Ownership

Ownership means total acceptance of what is, what has happened, and what can be done in the future. Taking ownership of your life means being in the driver’s seat.

When you take ownership, you reclaim your personal power over how you want to interpret your past. This forces you to see your mistakes for what they are and uncover nuggets of wisdom from supposedly ‘bad experiences’. 

Painful experiences are not painful in and of themselves. They are painful because of the meaning we attach to them.

In life, things don’t always go the way we want them to.

But if we don’t take full ownership for the things that happen to us, we’ll always feel bitter about things not going our way.

Also, full ownership could also mean fully ‘owning’ yourself – your strengths, your weaknesses, your gifts and your flaws.

Whenever we choose to ‘reject’ something in our lives – like a  traumatic experience, an abusive person or a personality flaw – we end up building walls in our lives, pushing away possibilities of a brighter future.

We make future decisions from a place of fear, doubt or paranoia.

And that’s no way to live.

For example: if say you had one painful experience doing public speaking, it’s very easy to simply reject doing public speaking altogether.

You’ll never be able to improve in that area as long as you’ve not taken ownership of that experience.

Another example is when there was someone in your life who hurt you deeply, and ever since then, you completely reject the ‘existence’ of that person. You decide to never forgive or forget what that person did to you out of fear of having to go through the same painful experience.

Yes, that person may have been wrong.

Yes, you may have been subjected to injustice.

Yes, that person may have been a vile, morally reprehensible human being.

But as long as you never take full ownership of your pain, you’ll never be able to recover and grow stronger from that experience.

If you have trouble accepting the hurt, you’ll never be able to own your healing.

Ownership is not easy. It means that you can no longer blame other people or circumstances for your pain. 

But when you do it, you allow yourself to break free from the chains those people or circumstances have on you. 

Own the good. Own the bad.

Choose to turn your pain into power through full ownership of everything you went through.

Own everything in your life, and reclaim the power that’s always been yours to begin with.