Have you ever failed to give homework in as a child and come up with an excuse for not doing it?
Have you ever resorted to the kind of excuse used in the title of this piece, where you’ve tried to convince the teacher that your dog ate your homework?
Looking back on things like this, we may raise a smile remembering some of the weirder excuses we may have used whilst growing up, when failing to turn in homework, or perhaps not wanting to do PE (Physical Education), so we came up with some excuses to get out of those which looking back, were equally daft?
But don’t we bring some of these excuses into adulthood too?
Don’t we sometimes treat other adults too with similarly vague or silly excuses to justify why we haven’t succeeded in a particular way?
So the excuses from childhood have only been tweaked for adulthood…
Such as, why aren’t we in the best job for our ability? Why have we let out talents go to waste? Why have we squandered all our money? Why haven’t we made a go of that business?
We then try and give an excuse, by saying life’s circumstances have prevented us from succeeding in some way, resulting in this non-success.
When in reality it may be more because we had a fear or lack of courage to “go for it”, but the excuse always feels better than having to admit we were actually afraid to try
Sometimes we really need to dispense with these lame excuses for non-success and realise they are just as bad as “The dog ate my homework”, because in reality who are we trying to fool? We’re only fooling ourselves if you haven’t succeeded, no one else.
So isn’t it better to look in the mirror at ourselves and face WHY we haven’t done something so we can be clear on how to put it right; as opposed to coming up with excuse after excuse to justify why things are just not happening for us
This isn’t easy for sure, but at least you can draw a line in the sand and put away the excuses, and instead give it a go!
Otherwise, you will forever be making daft excuses TO yourself!