Have you ever met anyone who makes excuses for everything? Are you that person? Making excuses can become an unhealthy habit that prevents you from facing the reality of your situation.
Why Should You Stop Making Excuses?
Excuses are a way of avoiding personal responsibility by blaming outside forces and others. You should stop making excuses so that you can take responsibility for your life, work on personal growth, and identify actions you can take to solve the issues in question.
Making excuses can be a difficult habit to break but you must do so if you want to grow as a person. You cannot fix any problems by making excuses. Excuses serve as a way of deflecting accountability and avoiding taking responsibility for yourself.
Why Do People Make Excuses?
People make excuses because they do not want to take responsibility. It can be very difficult to admit that you are at fault. In fact, it takes a great deal of confidence and humility to take responsibility for yourself. This motive is why so many people work so hard to make excuses, because they do not want to face the reality that they need to hold themselves accountable.
Your insecurity or disinterest in accepting responsibility drives you to make excuses. I personally have never fixed a single problem in my life by making an excuse. The only times I have seen improvement in my life was when I took responsibility for myself.
Example of Excuses
Lateness is a perfect example. People always want to make excuses about being late. I am almost never late, and on the rare occasions that I am late, it is always my fault. Either because I consciously accepted being late by prioritizing other activities, exhibited poor time management, or simply lost track of time. Nobody ever made me late for anything but me. Taking the stance that I am always responsible for my punctuality is why it is so easy for me to be on time.
I know plenty of people who are always late and who always make excuses. They want you to believe that they have the worst luck of anyone alive and the outside world conspired against them, preventing them from being on time. They want you to believe that they would always be on time if it wasn’t for the pesky world always getting in their way. The truth is they just don’t care enough to be on time and spend more time thinking up excuses than planning out how much time they need to get there on time.
I aim to get where I am going at least ten to fifteen minutes early. This is a simple way to be on time. No excuses are necessary. I just get there early and am, therefore, almost never late.
In order to make the choice to be early, I had to stop making excuses for being late and accept responsibility. People who leave home early are rarely late because they take fate out of the equation. They take control of their time and plan appropriately. If you plan to be early, it makes it easier to avoid being late when maybe there is a little extra traffic or the bus is behind schedule.
Stop Making Excuses and Take Responsibility
One thing I have said for years is that you need to blame yourself for all your problems in life. Obviously I am being a little hyperbolic. The reason I blame myself is because I can only fix problems if I am responsible. If you always see yourself as responsible then you can fix things. If you always see yourself as some kind of victim of outside forces you will fix nothing.
