The Best Year of Your Life

Excuses keep us from taking responsibility for our lives and prevent us from seeing the truth about our current reality. They are literally our attempt to “excuse” ourselves from acting like the responsible, powerful, creative human beings we are. Excuses have become a socially acceptable way of giving ourselves the “out” we might be looking for. Our excuses scream, “It’s not my fault”; “I couldn’t help it”; “I didn’t have time”; “My kids needed me”; “I told Sally to handle it”; “That’s not in my job description”; “I can’t do it all”; “It’s too big”; “I’m too stressed out”; “It’s too much work”; “I’m too busy already”; “I’m not smart enough”; “I did my part, but they didn’t do theirs”; “People around me are irresponsible”; “Someone else should handle this”; “Everything will fall apart if I don’t do it”; “I have a headache”; “The system is screwed up.” Excuses transfer all of our inner power to outer circumstances and strip away our ability to create results. They sabotage our dreams for our future and send us, time and time again, down the familiar path of our past. Excuses have the ability to infiltrate our deepest desires and best-laid plans and rob of us of having a life we love.

Excuses are automatic; they take no thinking or creativity. For many of us, we are so familiar with our excuses that we don’t even realize they are excuses. They show up as the truth of our lives. But hear this: Excuses are not the truth. We all have them, we all use them, and we all pretend we are made powerless by them. But if we are to have the best year of our lives, we have to be willing to give up all the excuses we’ve used. We have to ask ourselves this fundamental question: “Do I want to align with the greatest vision of myself, or do I want to align with my excuses?”

we continue to visit our NCZs because at some level we are afraid to change. We’re scared to grow up or afraid of failure. Most of us would rather stay where we are, even if we complain about it, than go for the gold and fail. So we keep falling into the proverbial hole that we know so well as a way to ensure that we will stay where there is some familiar comfort. Although we might claim that we want better, more productive, more fulfilling lives, we continue to hold on to what isn’t working. We use one excuse after another as to why we don’t have the life we desire and why our dreams have not turned into reality.