Is Making Excuses Ruining Your Business?

While it may be necessary from time to time to explain your behavior or decisions to others, if you find that you are constantly engaged in this type of behavior, you may be making excuses for yourself. If you need to explain your unhealthy or unwanted behaviors to others by making excuses, it may be time to make a change. 

Why We Make Excuses

There are many reasons you may try to justify your decisions or actions to someone else, but when these explanations come from a negative place or are meant just to rationalize your poor choices, your excuse-making could be harming your life. 

Among the many reasons people make excuses, fear and a lack of self-worth are among the top. Fear that others will judge your bad choices or see that you are making decisions that are harmful to yourself or others can lead to all sorts of excuses. When you lack the self-esteem to make better decisions for yourself, you may turn to making excuses for your poor performance or the self-handicapping behaviors you choose over attaining the success you desire. 

Many people want to excuse their lack of motivation for sustaining an effort. No one wants to admit they failed at something, after all. When you are doubtful of your own abilities, when you change your mind about what you are trying to achieve, or when you are afraid of how others will view you in light of your setbacks, excuses become a way to save face. 

Making excuses may seem like a harmless coping mechanism, but this behavior can harm your life in many ways. When you feel you have to give reasons for unhealthy choices and self-sabotaging behaviors, you can damage your health as well as your relationships with others. When you excuse away dishonest or illegal behavior, others can lose trust in you, as well. 

Excuses become a way to blame your bad choices on others or life’s circumstances, which keeps you from having to accept responsibility for or learn from your mistakes. Over time, making excuses just increases your own insecurities and wreaks havoc on your relationships with other people, both personally and professionally. 

If your excuses are holding you back from reaching your goals or achieving the happiness you want in life, you can change your mindset and start accepting responsibility for your life. Here are a few ways to improve your mindset from one of making excuses to one of taking responsibility. 

How To Stop Making Excuses 

When you are ready to stop making excuses and start taking responsibility in your life, there are many things you can do to change your mindset. Start with letting go of your need to compare yourself to others. Your strengths and gifts are yours and no one else’s, and it doesn’t matter what others have accomplished in their lives. 

Acknowledge your fears. Decide what is making you so afraid that you must make excuses for others and yourself. And what would happen in your life if those fears became a reality? Often, the anticipation is worse than the actual outcome. Confront your fears so you can move past them and stop avoiding them with excuses. 

If you want to stop making excuses, set a goal for yourself and create a plan for how you will accomplish it, including how you will make better choices when things get difficult. How can you plan for avoiding your normal behavior of making excuses? Start today by doing something that will make your dream a reality. 

Work on admitting your mistakes and faults. Be willing to accept your flaws as well as openly admit them to others in your life. No one is perfect, and when you start to recognize that it is okay that you aren’t either, you can stop making excuses when things go wrong. 

Most of all, you need to stop blaming others and start accepting responsibility for your life. No one got you where you are but yourself. No matter what, you made decisions that led to your present circumstances. Acknowledge your role, and stop placing blame on others, or you’ll never get rid of your excuse mindset. 

Learning to accept responsibility and stop making excuses will take time, but it is worth it in the end. When you stop making excuses, you can start to achieve your goals and attain the happiness you deserve. Once you’re ready to be finished with excuses and start taking action, you’ll see how quickly your life becomes what you want it to be. 

I’ve noticed that inner child work has been successful in helping my clients to stop making excuses. 

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