Stop Making Excuses – How to Get Rid of Excuses ?
Do you make excuses about why you can’t do something or have not achieved a goal? We all make excuses from time to time. It’s a common behavior and we make excuses knowingly and unknowingly. But, it has been observed that few people make it a habit and start giving excuses for almost everything. It’s get embedded in their personality. They try to rationalize “why” they didn’t follow through on a specific commitment. If you’ve developed a bad habit; where you make excuses all the time, then it might be time to curb this behavior. In this article we will learn about tips and strategies to stop making excuses and take the responsibility.
Why do people make excuses?
Like most of the bad habits are the easiest to adopt; making excuses is one of them. Excuses creates a protective shield around your comfort zone and do not allow you to come out of it. You feel fine and secure with the situations of life. After some time you may find that it’s not the way you were looking for.
Have you ever thought why you gave an excuse as the first place? It may be due to fear of unknown, uncertainty, lack of confidence, fear of failure or success. Surprised?? Yes, few people have fear of success also. We will discuss this in detail in different article.
How to Stop Making Excuses ?
Here are the tips on how to stop making excuses or get rid of habit of making excuses. These will help you to eliminate excuses and be more productive.
Check your thinking
An excused protective shield may ruin your life and you may feel bitter at later stages. Assess the situations or topics you are avoiding dealing with. Have a conversation with yourself to check your thinking. Are your reasons coming out of negative thinking? Or, is it an attempt to justify that it was not your fault? Or, is it to avoid your responsibilities? One may lie to others but can not lie self in front of the mirror. It’s hard to make fool yourself. Once you start giving excuses yourself, it will worsen the situation.
Try to know from where all this negative approach is coming out. Understand the reasons and allow the positive vibrations only. It will help you to stop making excuses.
Break large goals in small goals
Break your large goals in the small goals. When you set large general goals; it takes weeks and months go by to achieve them. Set intermediate small goals that you can achieve every single week or micro-goals you can achieve every day. Reaching small goals will pave the way to your large goal’s success. Smaller goals look more achievable and give required constant motivation.
For example, if your ultimate goal is to travel to Europe, a small goals checklist could be something like this:
Have discussions with family and determine countries to visit by Monday morning.
Finalize the travel date Create your travel itinerary by the end of Thursday.
Book the flight tickets and hotels by Saturday evening.
These are some general steps that will serve as a goal itinerary and allow you to stay on track to get to your ultimate goal.
Good friends
Make good friends, who create positive environment around you. Friends, who have different perspective towards problems and do not excuse for avoiding the situations or people. If you have friends, who have bad habits of making excuses, you will have so many excuses to exchange. Whenever you sit together and do conversations you will find yourself always complaining and excusing.
Take responsibility
People making excuses try to avoid the responsibilities; be it at professional or personal level. Taking an honest ownership and responsibility will reduce your excuse making habit. When you take ownership of your own actions and their consequences, you feel more confident. It helps to get rid of excuses making habit. Lack of ownership and responsibility derails you, it deprives you from taking certain productive steps. Make a commitment after taking those productive actions, whatever the result comes you are responsible for them. Accept them and learn from your mistakes. Your commitment to learn from your mistakes will help you develop the level of responsibility and maturity needed to make you a “no excuse” player.
Shift your perspective
Once you take responsibility, it’s time to have positive outlook and shift your perspective. Start looking towards problems as an opportunities, not obstacles. Changing your perspective towards life challenges will make the whole difference. You can take charge of life and transform it or keep making excuses.
Become more process oriented
Become more process oriented rather being a result oriented person. Fear of negative outcome or results prompts to make an excuse. Becoming process oriented means believing in your actions and you will the results eventually. Look at it as value addition to life; an opportunity for learning and enhancement of knowledge in every step of the journey, instead of worrying about results.
High self-esteem helps to get rid of excuses
High self-esteem helps you to believe in yourself. It boosts your self-confidence. You start trusting on your abilities, knowledge, competencies and experience. It reduces your fear of failure and in turn your excuse making habit is eliminated.
Mindfulness eliminates excuses
Be mindful about your communication with others. Try to notice when are you using “ifs” and “buts” while communicating. It is important to stop using ifs and buts in your communication, in fact even in your thinking (self talk). As soon as you notice these words; stop there, take a pause and concentrate on the positive aspects or brighter part of the issues. When you are making excuses unknowingly, awareness about when you are making an excuse will leads to change this habit.
How do you eliminate your excuses?
Over to you now, please share with us how do you eliminate your excuses? We look forward to learn from you, please share your experiences in comment section.
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