“Create value for you and for others within your parameters. Rest assured that it will sustain generations of personal capabilities and responsibilities” – Faraz Farook
What is Responsibility?
The state or fact of being responsible, answerable, or accountable for something within one’s power, control, or management.
What is Social Responsibility?
Social Responsibility is designed on the purity of ethics and the foundation is that an entity be it a singular individual, a corporation or a group of like-minded people, all have an obligation to society and the betterment of it in its entirety. We have come to realize that when we discuss Social Responsibility, two main streams of thought come into mind, one being Government Social Responsibility and the other being Corporate Social Responsibility. The lesser known Personal Social Responsibility is never really talked about obviously because it’s lesser known.
Personal Social Responsibility though is not a singled-out type of responsibility, it’s basically a culmination of Government and Corporate Social Responsibility, taking various cues and adding them to a well-rounded argument.
When discussing Personal Social Responsibility at length we must take into account possible topics of discussion and elaboration:
- Responsibility from you toward others in Society: It is important that we seldom be selfish for the betterment of ourselves but that does not mean that we continue to be that way and regrettably forsake the very fibres of our conscience. Being responsible toward others comes in small forms, by way of just being a good person and sometimes being a good person is enough. It refers to taking care of yourself enough to be able to watch over and be responsible toward others. As fine as the line may be, it does exists quite clearly. An example of this would be the simple rule of not consuming alcohol before or while driving. It puts the lives of others and yourself at risk of intoxicated behaviour and most often than not, the results are fatal not to mention the amount of damage that could take place in terms of physical or personal property.
- Mindfulness matters: We often hear the phrase, ‘be mindful of others’ or ‘be mindful of yourself’ and in lot of the cases, it turns out to be a valid phrase. Being Mindful matters in great detail because how you might treat a person or a particular situation that a person is in set the tone of the perception that that person will have of you going forward. Mindfulness also helps a great deal in aiding different people or yourself because the chances are that the people you meet on a daily basis could be going through their worst and best moments in life and speaking about it to them can really sometimes help them. It doesn’t matter who they might be or from which walk of life they come from, it is in your best interest to be mindful of them so that they in turn can be mindful of others of whom they come across. An example of this would be wearing the seatbelt while driving. The question to be raised in this example is whether you are actually wearing your seatbelt because you are mindful of the safety of yourself or others or because you’re just terrified of getting caught by the authorities.
- Be a leader, set the example: There are a lot of people who talk about being a leader but lately the term “Leader” has been grossly misconstrued in a variety of different ways. A leader isn’t someone who hands out a series of tasks, activities to people and then sits by and watches it unfold in front of their eyes. A leader is someone who provides the guidance and the care needed to nurture and grow something whether it be an idea or a person. A lot of the time, people do not want to step forward and be a leader because that involves a fair amount of responsibility and while that is fair it is also important to consider the opportunity that is missed to create and set about a change in the overall goal of Personal Social Responsibility. There is no right or wrong way to set an example as such, just that if the example set is set by a good person and a leader, then other people will follow suit. Pollution is rampant in every single country and the way to bring about change and set an example as a leader is to reduce personal waste thrown in bodies of water or on roads in the hope that other people will also follow and create a bigger impact.
- Creating a responsibility driven culture: While us Humans are fully capable of maintaining a sense of responsibility, we sometimes decide to shy away from the overall case of it altogether. Now while responsibility is not for the faint hearted as such, it can come to a point where we are void as a society of responsibility toward anything, let alone change. It is therefore important what we begin the basics in terms of creating a responsibility driven culture so that we can nurture the future generation of people to create and maintain a change in Personal Social Responsibility.
In light of all you’ve read and all you’ve understood, it is important to maintain a culture and a generation of individuals and corporations who are, above all, Personally Socially Responsible people. The destruction in the world today is because people have not thought about the effects of their actions which means that they have been very careless and the complete opposite of PSR which is not to say against the idea but possibly there was no pause or stop to consider the repercussions.
On ending, it is important to stress that changing into a PSR based mindset is not important just for us, it’s important for every lifetime to come and everyone that will “be” in this world. With that, I would like to end by a very famous quote from a great leader Mahatma Gandhi “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
Author – Faraz Farook
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