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  • Tara Smith

Take Responsibility to Take Control of Your Life



One of the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned is the power and momentum you gain by taking full responsibility for every aspect of your life. Taking responsibility over a situation gives you more control over the outcome. This is not easy to do. Why? Because being the victim and placing your woes outside of your circle of control is so much easier. Now don’t get me wrong, we can’t control everything. There really are some aspects that are out of our circle of control. But not usually as many as we’d like to categorize that way.


At least three times per week, I get emails and messages from people all over the US, usually in their 30s and 40s, who are frustrated with the older generation for various reasons: don’t want to change, aren’t interested in increasing profit, won’t start the transition process, etc. My advice is always a little bit of tough love, because the very first thing they are going to have to do is take themselves out of the victim mentality where they are blaming everything on Mom/Dad/Gma/Gpa, and instead put themselves in the captain’s chair. They must ask themselves two questions:

1. How am I partially responsible for the way things are currently going?

2. What can I do, as the captain of my ship, to create forward momentum from here forward?

I can tell in 30 seconds if they are going to be successful in this endeavor or not simply by their response to these questions.


Now, before I go too far, I want to go backwards. Five years ago, I absolutely was this person mentioned above and I absolutely would have failed to answer these questions correctly. Full stop. I had made myself and my parents the victims of the lack of transitioning that was happening on our ranch. Fast forward a few years after we had gotten my grandparents transitioned out of the ranch, and I again found myself the victim of a ranch that wasn’t growing economically. I began to start throwing ideas out and suggesting ways to make change, but I went about it all wrong, and when I was rejected, I created my own pity party. It’s important that before I go much further, you know that I have been in those shoes, and I handled it poorly. I 100% own up to that. And honestly, if someone would have told me at that time that I needed to take responsibility for the situation, I probably would not have been in the right headspace to listen to them. I probably wouldn’t have even known how to start, and mostly because I wouldn’t have wanted to. It was easier to feel sorry for myself and my situation.


So now I’m going to tell you a story. One morning, our ranch team, who consists of MDH and my mother, sat down for a ranch meeting. At this time, we were meeting about every two to three months. I had a whole list of topics on our agenda to talk about. Somewhere in the meeting, things got tense. Like, REALLY tense. I felt like both my mom and my husband were 100% not in agreement with any of the things I wanted to do moving forward, even though I could show them very clearly that it increased our bottom line. There was yelling, tears, and we didn’t get through the whole agenda. I left that afternoon to go to Billings for an Executive Link meeting. I bawled the entire way, which is saying something, because I’m not all that much of a cryer. But I was certain that our ranch was going into the ground and our relationships were so poor that my little family was not going to be able to stay there. Pity party, seat for one. I was the victimist victim of all victimhoods. But I didn’t realize that at the time. I don’t have time to explain how Executive Link works in its entirety, but I will sum it up by saying that it is a VERY organized and strategic method for each business within your board to communicate their problems and issues they want to fix, then allow the board members to help create ideas and solutions, or possibly find other problems you aren’t aware of. (I 10/10 recommend EL. It is the graduate program to the Ranching For Profit School, which I also recommend.) Anyways, one of the members of our board was a retired police officer who was gruff and tough and somewhat intimidating. He had exactly zero tolerance for bullsh**. For the first 50 of my 60 minutes, I poured it all out to my board and was 100% expecting sympathy and support. I got it from some and was feeling much better, though I didn’t really have a solution. In the last five to ten minutes of my meeting, Mr. Gruff, as we’ll call him, who hadn’t said much the entire time, sits back and says this, “Tara, if I needed a CEO for my ranch, I would not hesitate to hire you.” Now, compliments from people who rarely give complements are a treasure. I was thinking, wow, that’s pretty great to hear. Then he said, “You’re the CEO of your ranch, right?” I said I was. He said, “Then you need to start acting like it.” The room was completely silent. Everyone was staring at him, then staring at me to gauge my reaction. Most people probably would have let this offend them, but this hit home for me. I have always appreciated direct, honest feedback, and this was exactly that. I changed everything about how I interacted with my team after that. We started meeting weekly for several months, then bi-weekly. I got my work done. I used the systems I had learned for communicating and problem solving. And magically, our relationships improved, we all got on the same page, I took the work we had done with our ICA process and created a mission and vision statement. We had a forward direction that involved everyone and motivated everyone. Now, in all conflict situations, I remind myself that if I am going to be the captain of my own ship, I need to act like it. It has completely changed my perspective on so many things. I have taken responsibility for problems that arise, and am learning more tools everyday to resolve these issues and find solutions. This way of thinking puts more weight on your shoulders, but at the same time elevates your life in ways that are hard to understand until you’ve experienced it.


I want this for each and every one of you. But you have to make the choice. You have to be able to set your ego aside, and dig deep. It isn’t easy, but I promise you it will be worth it.


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