Excuses Are Easy. Taking Responsibility is Not.

I hate excuses. I really do. They’re too easy to make and have absolutely no benefit for you, or for anybody else. All making excuses do is prevent you from taking responsibility for your actions and decisions. It’s so easy to make an excuse when:

• you don’t follow through on a promise
• something goes wrong
• you fail at something

This is not a good thing! Excuses are one of the biggest hurdles on the journey to self-improvement. A person who is constantly making excuses for themselves is not a person who is becoming the best version of themselves. It’s usually quite the opposite. It’s a person who wants to take no accountability and is stagnant in their life.

Making excuses is easy. But taking ownership of your actions, now that is difficult.

Don’t Blame Others for Your Problems

I am of the belief that you never make excuses for yourself, ever! That means not only taking ownership of your actions but doing it 100% of the time!

This means that when something goes wrong, you aren’t blaming anybody, or anything, else. This is extremely challenging for many reasons. One of the major ones being that most of the time, it was not completely your fault. Maybe it was somewhat your fault, but it is rarely ever 100% your fault. Usually, there will be somebody else involved who is just as much to blame for what went wrong, if not more so. I truly believe though:

That. Doesn’t. Matter.

Even if somebody else is also to blame, you still should take 100% of the blame and responsibility for your part in the situation. Once you start sharing the blame or passing the blame around, it gets easy to continue doing so. And if you do that, you will take responsibility for your actions less and less. This will stunt your growth and prevent you to evolve as a person.

Example

Your significant other asked you to go grocery shopping yesterday on your way home from work so they could make dinner tonight. The problem is, they asked you while you were watching T.V. You have told them many times not to talk to you when you are in the middle of watching T.V. because you will give a mindless “uh-huh” answer without actually paying attention to what they are saying. Still, they did it anyway expecting you to now get the ingredients for dinner. Of course, you show up empty-handed.

Now it’s really easy for you to put the blame on your significant other. It’s also really easy for them to put the blame on you.

“I told her a million times not to talk to me when I’m watching the game!”

“He should have known better!”

“This isn’t my fault.”

From an outsider’s view, I think it is safe to say that the blame could be shared 50/50. The person watching TV should not be agreeing to do things if they are not actually paying attention to what they are agreeing to. A simple “Babe, I’m distracted please ask me again during the commercial break” would most likely suffice. On the flip side, the significant other should have known better than to ask their partner a question while the partner is distracted since they’ve communicated this in the past.

Now – here is why accountability is so important. If neither person wants to take responsibility and puts the blame on the other person, nothing will change. This same exact situation will most likely happen again because each person will convince themself that it was the other person’s fault and therefore the other person needs to change.

But what if both of them took responsibility for their actions. If they both acknowledged they could have done something differently to avoid this situation, they would each make a conscious effort to prevent this from happening next time. Even if only one of them did this, they could prevent this situation from happening again! That is how powerful taking responsibility for your actions can be. Only one person needs to do it to get the results that you are looking for.

No Excuses

If there isn’t another person involved, then you most definitely should not be making excuses for yourself! You are 100% responsible for your actions. Sure, you can blame circumstances. You can always blame something. There wasn’t enough time, I didn’t have enough information, this, that, and the other.

The truth of the matter is you could have made time if it was important enough. You could have taken it upon yourself to find out the information if you really wanted to. You could have done this, you could have done that, and you could have done the other!

A great example of this is when somebody tells themselves they are going to start losing weight by working out and eating healthy. If they don’t go to the gym because “there wasn’t enough time”, that’s just making excuses. There are 24 hours in a day, and you couldn’t use 1 to work out? That’s doesn’t mean there wasn’t enough time, it means you didn’t prioritize it.

Or, if you decide to break your diet and have some junk food. “I earned it,” you think to yourself. Now, that is completely your decision. But don’t put the blame elsewhere or be ignorant to the fact you broke your earlier promise to lose weight.

Even worse, if you go out to eat with a friend and end up eating unhealthy food, don’t blame your friend for your decision! Nobody put a knife to your neck or put those delicious french fries in your mouth. You did it to yourself. It doesn’t mean to beat yourself up about it either. These things happen. But it does mean to take responsibility.

No excuses!

Best,

Eric