A man asked his neighbor if he could borrow his car. The neighbor said, “No, I’m sorry, but I have to shave later.”
When the neighbor walked inside his house, his wife, who had overheard him talking, asked him why he gave such a bad excuse for not lending out his car.
He said, “If you don’t want to do something, one excuse is just as good as another.”
Sometimes the excuses other people give us for not wanting to do things are just plain bad, and sometimes the excuses we give to ourselves for not doing things are equally as poor. At the end of the day, an excuse is the reason we give for not taking a particular action, and there is no shortage of creative reasons we can give to justify our actions (or lack thereof).
You can make up excuses for just about anything. It’s not difficult to come up with reasons for why you do what you do or why you don’t do what you don’t do. You can make excuses for why you didn’t get your work done, or why you didn’t do what was asked of you in a relationship. You can even make excuses for why you’re not going to choose to stick to something you said you would. You can come up with reasons for why you’re not doing what you want to be doing in life, for why you’re not where you want to be, or for why you aren’t the kind of person you know you can be. Ultimately, though, when the rubber hits the road, if you haven’t done something, you haven’t done it, and if you have, you have.
There’s a great technique I use in counseling sessions to help people lessen the number of excuses they make in life. If you want, I invite you to try it, too: To save time on making excuses and to bring awareness to what you’re doing, the next time you begin to make an excuse, simply say the word “Excuse!” in place of whatever it is that you were going to make up. The more you hear yourself saying the word “excuse,” the more you will be faced with either owning your actions or changing them.
Try it – you may find it helps you to make fewer excuses in your day-to-day life. Or, you may just say, “Excuse!” and not do anything differently at all.
The choice is yours; but so too, is the responsibility.