When You’re Not Achieving What You Want,
What’s Your Excuse?
Last week there was an article in USA Today entitled “The Clock is Ticking on Excuses.” The article centered on the goals of eating healthfully and exercising regularly and included comments by Bill Phillips, author of Body for Life. I’ve read the article a couple of times now. While the focus of the article is living a healthy life, Phillips’comments can be applied to anything you want to achieve in your life.
Phillips says the biggest excuse he hears for people not eating healthfully or exercising regularly is “I don’t have time.” It’s an excuse I hear regularly for people not achieving their goals or not taking the actions to achieve their goals. Most of the time I don’t believe it. When my clients tell me they don’t have time, it’s a clue to me their priorities might not be in order.
Are you letting yourself off the hook?
It's time to jump off the escuse-making merry-go-round.
When we make excuses for ourselves, when we let ourselves off the hook for not achieving our goals – or even for not taking the action to achieve our goals, the result is a double-whammy: we don’t achieve the goal and we end up not feeling good about ourselves because we’ve let ourselves off the hook. We end up on a merry-go-round of excuse making and it can be difficult to jump off.
If you find yourself the victim of your own excuses, it’s time to step back, take a good hard look at yourself and your goals, and make some decisions. The most important decision you can make is to take 100% responsibility for yourself and your actions, or lack thereof.
You are in the driver’s seat of your life.
You are the architect of your life.
You must take 100% responsibility for your life.
When individuals finally accept 100% responsibility for themselves, they begin to soar. I’ve seen it time and time again.
The topic of personal responsibility is huge – and crucial to goal achievement. I’ll talk more about personal responsibility in a future post, but for now, here’s my challenge to you: simply begin to become aware of the excuses you make for yourself. Perhaps even write them down in a notebook. Awareness of your excuses is the very first step to jumping off the merry-go-round of excuse making.
