Excuse Me! by Morgana BraveRaven

Excuse Me!
by Morgana Braveraven

Have you ever had this experience: You’re reading a book and all of a sudden the page reaches up and smacks you across the face? Well, believe me, it can happen (and by the way, it stings…). It happened to me this morning (and I have a page print on my left cheek to prove it!).

I’m reading a book right now called The Best Year of Your Life by Debbie Ford, and I don’t think a book has ever affected me the way this book has. I think it would be safe to assume that if I am reading a book called The Best Year of Your Life that I probably haven’t yet had the best year of my life – and it’s true. By my own account, I have not. At the moment, I am recovering from one of the nastiest colds I have ever had. It has lasted in excess of a month and has left me feeling drained and a tich depressed. It has kept me from attending to daily life in the way that I usually do and thus life has piled up around me like so many wobbly one hundred story towers ready to topple at any moment. It’s a rather uncomfortable feeling.

So, here I sit reading the book, frequently nodding my head and affirming to myself, oh yeah, I do that. Yup, I do that too. And that… And my goodness, guilty of that one too. Ugh! I grab a notebook and begin to scribble down notes. Every paragraph within the book resonates deeply within me, right down to the bone cells in the baby toe of my right foot. Every now and then I have to stop to digest what I have read and to give it some thought. I am quickly coming to understand why I have not had the best year of my life. There are many reasons, but here is the paragraph that stopped me dead:

“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?”

Smack! “Do I want to align with the greatest vision of myself, or do I want to align with my excuses?” Answers itself, doesn’t it...

Over the last weeks while I have been recovering from this cold I have had a great deal of time to reflect on why I am not where I would like to be at this time in my life. Now this is not what I really want to be thinking about. I would rather think about how I will spend the summer or what I will wear when I perform my duties as Maid of Honor at my best friends wedding in August. How about that cute guy in my salsa class? I think I’d rather think about him than why I am not where I want to be – but, there it is, that niggling thought keeps wiggling up, like an unwelcome worm, into my consciousness. The thought is relentless. It wiggles in then wraps itself around my brain like a boa constrictor, squeezing and refusing to let go until I finally resolve and take a good look at the issue.

I am not where I want to be. It’s not the end of the world, but it has become a recurring stone to stumble across in my life. I seem to continually arrive at the same spot over and over again, and this has become a frustration and a bit of a personal embarrassment. I know from past experience that we continually end up in the same spot when we fail to change the pattern of choices that keep us there. It’s like skiing around in a circle at the base of a cliff when we’re trying to get up the mountain. Round, and round, and round we go, looking up every now and again and wondering why we’re not there yet…

So, how am I going to get up that mountain? Well, quite frankly, I know one thing that is keeping me in the same spot – EXCUSES! Sadly, they have become my truth. I have a complicated life, most of us do. I have too much on my plate, again, most of us do. There is nothing about me or the circumstances of my life that can honestly hold me back from my dream, and I know this. There is only one thing holding me back – ME. Me and my excuses (amongst other things ;o). Oh, we do make a cozy couple, but the relationship is not a healthy one. My relationship with my excuses and my dependence on them is stopping me from achieving all that I seek to achieve. They have become as natural as breathing. They have become my reality.

I can’t get up and mail to my lists at 6:00 am because I work too hard and I am exhausted. I need my sleep! I can’t make that prospecting call at 5:30 because I would be interrupting someone’s dinner. I can’t leave a message on that answering machine because the person, upon hearing my voice, will immediately hate me and block all future calls from me. I can’t be bothered with sending a message to my contact list because that just doesn’t work. I can’t finish my to do list because it’s too big. I can’t redesign my website right now because I just don’t know what I want it to convey – I’ll do it later… I’ll do it tomorrow.

Go ahead, ask me to do anything. I can come up with an excuse as to why I can’t do it without even thinking about the question. Years ago I learned from a very wise man that there are really only two options not to do something. One option is that you physically cannot complete the task. The other is that you will not complete the task. “Will not” is a choice. To any of the conundrums above I can assure you that I chose not to complete the task. Everyday I would make excuses and by doing so I was making conscious choices not to do what I knew I had to do in order to get where I wanted to be. A little bit of self sabotage going on here, me thinks.

It seems to me that I need to rethink my “truth”. Consider a couple of my choices above: I can’t get up and mail to my list at 6:00 a.m. because I work too hard and I am exhausted. I need my sleep! Is it a matter of can’t or won’t? It’s true, I do work too hard, I am exhausted, and I do need my sleep. However, getting up or not getting up at 6:00 a.m. is a choice that I make every day. Am I capable of getting up at six? Of course I am! “I can’t get up at six” is an excuse, not a truth. If I really need more sleep, I could just as easily go to bed an hour earlier and get up at 6:00 a.m. If I go to bed at ten and get up at six I will be well rested and will be able to mail to my lists at a time when it will make a difference to my business. I will feel a sense of accomplishment and I will empower myself. If I go to bed at eleven and get up at seven, I will also be well rested, but I will not have time to mail to my lists at a time that it would make a difference to my business. I will feel guilty about my choice and I will feel disempowered.

Likewise, I can empower myself by making shorter to do lists and making them realistically manageable, instead of doing nothing and feeling like a failure. Excuses are problems in disguise and you can’t solve a problem by excusing it. Excuses lead to disempowerment and hopelessness.

And as I know that there are so many out in the world like me, stuck or struggling, I invite you to examine your choices. Whenever you find yourself making an excuse not to do something – stop! Stop and think about what you are choosing. Do you wish to align yourself with the truth and step into your power, or do you wish to disempower yourself and align yourself with hopelessness? As always, it boils down to choice. Right now I choose to go finish The Best Year of Your Life and learn to uncover some other ways that I hold myself in the same place, so off I go for now. And if you are one of the stuck might I suggest you do the same. It’s an excellent read and a timely eye-opener (want more book info? Go here: http://www.bestyearofyourlife.com/). I hope that you have a productive and prosperous week – there’s no excuse not to.

Morgana Braveraven
http://show--me.com/?i=41785/