Quote:
Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure. ~Don Wilder and Bill Rechin
Excuses are what we tell ourselves to avoid dealing with unpleasant truths. As long as we keep entertaining these excuses, we will never face and deal with the real issues or problems. An important step in personal growth is to uproot excuse-making with consciousness and courage and confront the real issues.
We tend to make excuses to avoid appropriate and good suggestions and more often than not, ending the route of our impending success.
Most excuses use negative ideas, thoughts, words or phrases to degrade or degenerate oneself which resulted in not moving forward. Excuses are getaway one tells oneself for not good enough to do the task and therefore there is no need even to try. The fact is that if one did not even tried, how does one knows that he/she is competent? Prolong negative thoughts and actions always lead to disastrous outcomes.
Some of the most common excuses and their underlying truths:
Don’t have enough time.
We often heard this excuse but the actual truth is that there is always time for activities you want to do or must do. These activities can includes going for exercise, built better relationships with your siblings or children, taking up community service etc.
Many other people are happily doing all these activities and the difference is that they have made no excuses but have given priority, commitment and leverage a high level of importance to these activities. Needless to predict, they will face success in their endeavor.
People using excuses for not exercising are really saying that exercise simply isn’t important to them. It’s easier to give the excuse of lack of time, but the real problem is a lack of will.
I don’t know how.
This is the easier excuse to give because if one does not know how to do, then one does not have to do. The truth behind “I don’t know how” is “I’m unwilling to learn.” In other words, you have to admit that you’re lazy.
Don’t let excuses run your life. If you catch yourself using excuses, immediately replace it with a statement of the real truth. At first, that truth may seem uncomfortable and excuses seem to be tempting, but when you start facing the truth, you’ll have the opportunity to grow. For example, if you face your unwillingness to learn, you may decide that even though it would be a lot of hard work to learn a new skill, you still insisted on doing it as you wanted it badly enough to commit yourself to learning it.
Using excuses on external, uncontrollable factors such as lack of time, information, or resources on our failure always lead to not solving our underlying problems because those factors aren’t under our direct control. We need to put aside our excuses and look for genuine causes that we can control. What we can control, we can improve.
We can’t control time, but we can control how we prioritize the actions that fill that time. We can’t control information, but we can choose what to learn as well as how much effort we devote to learning. So by controlling the factors that are within our control, we can have time used wisely, gather information and all the resources we desire.
Classical example: Waking up in the morning….
We always give ourselves excuse especially early in the morning when it is cooling to carry on sleeping instead of waking up immediately to go for exercise. It takes a steel of discipline to push oneself out of bed. Most of the time, when the alarm clock rings, we usually tends just to slap it down and thought that we will wake up five minutes later. The five minutes delayed usually ended up half to one hour later. The trick is to wake up immediately after the alarm rings and there will be no more excuse or issue of not waking up on time. Studies have indicated that it will take 21 days to form a habit and if it is your choice to wake up on time, start practicing today!
