The Excuses We Make
We are natural born excuse makers. The excuses we make can determine where our life goes, and whether or not it is successful. What is an excuse? It is a justification for doing – or not doing – something. The dictionary implies that it’s a “reason.” However, in reality, an excuse usually turns out to be something other than the real reason that motivates your actions. Are you guilty of being an excuse maker?
Here’s an example: Let’s say that your excuse for being late to work was traffic. That’s not truly the reason you didn’t make it to work on time. The reason you were late was because you left your home without enough time to allow for traffic. Excuses are never the reason for why you did or didn’t do something. They’re just a revision of the facts that you make up in order to help yourself feel better about what happened, or didn’t happen. Making excuses won’t change your situation; only getting to the real reason behind it can do this. Excuses are for people who refuse to take responsibility for their life and how it turns out. Slaves and victims make excuses – and will forever be destined to having leftovers and other’s scraps.
Excuses never improve your situation. Here are some of the excuses I hear on almost a daily basis:
I don’t have the money.
I have kids.
I don’t have kids.
I have to find balance in my life.
I am overworked.
I don’t like reading.
I don’t have time.
The economy is bad.
No one is motivated.
People have bad attitudes.
No one told me.
It was someone else’s fault.
They keep changing their minds.
I am tired.
I need a vacation.
I’m depressed.
I’m sick.
My mom is sick.
Traffic is terrible.
The competition is giving its product away.
I have such bad luck.
Are you guilty of saying any of these? Now ask yourself, will any of these excuses ever improve your condition? I doubt it.
If you’ve been following me on Facebook this week, you’ll know that we had a slab leak since last week. We were without running water for almost a week. I could have whined and complained about it, and missed my workouts, but I dealt with it. Here’s what I did: I had pots of water on the stove so that we could wash our hands. I rinsed our fruit with that water. I did laundry at the neighbors. For showers, we could turn the water on for about 20 minutes before it started to flood the house, so showers had to be super quick. Dishes were hand washed. I worked out in half the space I was used to. I was determined NOT to let this ruin my last couple weeks.
Thank goodness the leak is fixed now! But we had the run around from the insurance company. And there’s still a hole in the MIDDLE of my gym floor, so now the question is, do we fix the tile or get entirely new floors?
Nothing happens to you, it happens because of you. Let that sink in for a moment…are you seeing the picture now? Excuses are just another component of this – and a major differentiator between whether you will succeed or not. And once you adopt a more advanced sense of responsibility – and refuse to make any more excuses – then you can go out and search for a solution.
