RESPONSIBILITY PIE
A helpful way to see what is — and is not — your responsibility
Do you find yourself taking all the blame when something goes wrong? Perhaps you replay situations afterwards and think you should have known, prevented the outcome, kept somebody happy or handled everything differently.
The Responsibility Pie is a simple CBT-informed exercise that can help you look at the whole picture rather than automatically giving yourself 100% of the responsibility.
The exercise encourages you to identify all the factors that contributed to a situation — other people’s choices, communication, timing, circumstances, expectations, systems, pressures, the information available at the time and your own part. These are then represented as slices of a pie.
This is not about avoiding accountability. It is about making responsibility more accurate.
Inside the full guide you will find:
• a clear explanation of the Responsibility Pie
• step-by-step instructions
• a printable Responsibility Pie worksheet
• questions for challenging guilt and self-blame
• support for people who tend to carry other people’s feelings and responsibilities
• guidance around responsibility, influence, control and boundaries
• a personal supportive message from me
A useful reminder to take away is:
“I can take responsibility for my part without taking responsibility for the whole.”
The percentages do not need to be perfect. The purpose is to become curious about the wider picture and recognise what genuinely belonged to you — and what did not.
Space to Breathe Therapy
