This idea makes me feel very uncomfortable, as it challenges the way that I see myself. It is likely that your feelings could be similar to mine, but the fact that you are reading this article tells me that there is a part of you that wishes to face things head on.
This article is about you. It is best to approach it not from a detached 3rd person angle, but from a personal perspective where you will look to see where it applies to your life, because that is why you are reading this (or so I hope).
EXCUSES ARE NOT JUST THINGS YOU TELL ANOTHER PERSON
This is the first key point. Excuses do not just happen in personal relationships; they also happen internally within your own mind when you “talk to yourself”. Internal excuses are the “story” which you tell yourself so that you don’t have to actually go outside of your comfort zone and grow.
The major difference between these two types of excuses is that external excuses are easily detectable; while internally they can be completely out of your awareness.
When you create an excuse for not doing what you should be, your mind will rationalise it as being a perfectly reasonable way of thinking (I know that this doesn’t relate to you in any way at all, but just play along 
). In this way, the excuse is totally covered up, and you will never be aware of it unless you can catch yourself in the process.
Now would be a good time to stop reading this article and quickly write down or list in your head 5 ways you tend to make excuses.
Thinking of this sort of thing can be very confronting; at least it can be for me. I first started writing out my thoughts on tiny scraps of paper in font so small that no one could see, and even the act of doing this drained my mind of energy and made me want to escape. This was because it was directly challenging my sense of identity, although I didn’t know it at the time.
By the way, did you end up listing those 5 excuses from before, or did you make an excuse and simply continued reading?
THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM
We are now going further down the rabbit hole.
Here’s a question for you: If no-one else will ever know about the excuses that are made in our own minds, why do we make them in the first place!? What is the point?
You may have already grasped the answer intuitively, or you could have just begun to get a clearer picture in your mind; whichever the case is, this line should either confirm your current beliefs, or give you a new deeper understanding.
The mind will create stories in order to protect a person’s sense of identity or “self-image”.
Pushing out of comfort zone means performing actions that are seen as “not you”; this threatens to shake the very foundations of your identity. Our minds are truly a brilliant tool, but they cannot distinguish between a threat to your current identity (via growth) and a genuine threat to your existence. This is why they will do things like make up stories that excuse you from doing something different.
To put it briefly, the story is a function of one’s own self-image.
YOUR STORY CRIPPLES GROWTH
Growth comes from pushing the limits; any body builder will tell you that if you want to build muscle, you have to push yourself to the point where the fibres of your muscle actually tear. They ache a bit afterwards, but then they repair themselves stronger (and larger) than before. Same thing applies for personal growth, but instead of having a hard workout, you have to get outside of your comfort zone.
The thing about carrying around a story or ten is that they keep you from taking the actions that would be needed for you to grow. The story is like a blindfold, and those who cannot see are not very good at moving where they want to go without bumping into things.
The essence of an excuse is a distortion or denial of reality. People who spend time denying reality with quiet excuses will find themselves frustrated that they just can’t get things to work out for them, because you can’t work with something if you don’t acknowledge that it exists. I’ve heard it said that people are happy to the degree that they perceive they have control of their own life. Based on my experience with people, it seems that the people who “make things happen” are a hell of a lot happier than the ones who “things just happen to”.
So next time you find yourself making an excuse, take this as a warning siren to stop what you are doing immediately and rethink things through. No excuses!
