Dealing With Excuses? Try This
A simple and effective strategy to growth.
“Your belief determines your action and your action determines your results, but first you have to believe.” ~Mark Victor Hansen
Up until a few weeks ago I wasn’t all that into exercising daily.
When it came to my health I spent a lot of that time putting things off to the point that I didn’t workout that day.
However all of that started to change once I had a talk with my mentor and I discovered something.
Something pretty big that would help me overcome my excuses.
Making Commitments
Desire is the key to motivation, but it’s determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal — a commitment to excellence — that will enable you to attain the success you seek. — Mario Andretti
The advice is simple: make commitments to what you want to achieve.
But to truly leverage it, it’s important to know why we come up with excuses.
You can say your committed all you like, but people will eventually give up if they focus purely on action and trying to fix things.
A lot of times the battle comes from internal, emotionally. I know this because I’ve been wrestling with exercising daily for years now.
Excuses stem from us feeling doubt, fear, or hesitation.
We don’t believe in what we are capable of.
Perhaps we don’t believe in the person that we could become through the activity.
Because of that, we rationalize it and create an excuse.
That excuse is then used as a barrier constantly to keep us at bay.
Dealing With Excuses
Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort. — Paul J. Meyer
Because excuses are all internal, the idea is to combat it with emotions.
True, consuming motivational content can be uplifting. But it’s temporary.
It won’t solve your long-term problems for you.
You need to rely on yourself and believe in yourself to get through it all.
Dealing with excuses is much like with handling fears or doubts: using affirmations.
Like I said above, we need to make commitments and believe in ourselves.
This means removing any doubts that we have and replace it with positive and realistic reinforcement.
Once you start doing that, you can start to break down those restrictions that you placed on yourself.
Excuses are nothing but restrictions that we believe exist in us.
A Shift In Thinking
The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment. — Tony Robbins
By affirming and reinforcing your belief, you can then start to use it to take action. Affirmations are great, but much like motivational content in general, it loses it’s power if it’s not backed by an action on your part.
How I started to overcome my excuses on daily exercises was by affirming myself. I went back to my excuses and asked why they existed.
By doing that, I realized my excuses didn’t hold any water at all.
I didn’t even know why I was skipping work out days.
So what I did was popped on a motivational video and started to work out. I found a good 15 minute one and said to work out until the video was over.
Now I play music in the background and set a timer for 15 minutes and do that every day with no thought behind it.
This caused a simple shift in my thinking that changed my life around.
Try This
Your excuses are nothing but barriers.
When you question the reasons behind those excuses, you can break them down into small pieces.
Followed by bolstering yourself through affirmations and belief, you can overcome your excuses and motivate yourself to take action.
From there it’s a matter of doing it.
You got this!
To your growth!
Eric S Burdon
This post is part of an 3 month writing challenge that I’m committing myself to. Every day for 3 months, I’ll be writing articles with specific criteria in mind. You can learn all about my reasoning as well as what that criteria is right here. This is 14 of 91 of this series.
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