Excuses
When I was a young boy my proper Swedish Grandmother corrected me when I said, “Excuse me” when I wanted to be pardoned.
Her lesson was you say, “Excuse me” when you want to leave the room and “Pardon me” when you want to be pardoned for offensive behavior, like belching loudly as young boys do.
So, fast forward to our teen and adult years . . . we begin using an excuse as a way to get pardoned. It rarely works.
Don’t most of us have the word “Excuse” filed in the non desirable category? We have to qualify it with the word “legitimate” in order to make it acceptable.
Excuses, by and large, don’t get us pardons but that doesn’t keep us from dropping them like confetti.
I wonder what would happen if we spent the same amount of time that we dedicate to crafting excuses to doing the thing we want to be pardoned for not doing. Novel idea!
Find your excuse and you find your problem.
Are you making excuses for someone else? That’s even deeper do-do!
What do we make excuses for? – Behavior.
Behavior is a measurable action. Excuses ask us not to take a measurement.
“Don’t judge me on my behavior, judge me on my intention” seems to be the plea of the Excusee.
The first cousin of an excuse is a justification – another pardon seeker.
If you can envision excuses as roadblocks, you have a general idea why we can’t move forward with them in place.
Here’s our collective assignment for today. Let’s find a long standing excuse that we issue over and over and commit to never using it again.
That doesn’t mean the behavior won’t show up again; it just means that we won’t prop it up with the inaction of an excuse.
When we stop making excuses, we become more focused on the behavior. It’s much easier to go to work on a behavior when it isn’t surrounded by an entourage of excuses.
I hope you’ll pardon me if I’ve offended you with this rather loud belch. I’m now excusing myself from the room.
All the best,
John
http://cdbaby.com/cd/johnmorgan
http://www.cafepress.com/grasshoppernote/3580301
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