Excuses Are Getting in Your Way:
Breaking The Contract
An excuse is a contract. When many of us think of contracts, we picture corporate giants sitting in the center of a lavish boardroom on Wall Street or a star athlete signing a multi-million dollar deal to play with a certain team. An excuse doesn’t really fit this sort of mold, but make no mistake an excuse is a contract you make with yourself. A contract necessitates an exchange. You give something, and you get something. In the case of an athlete, that athlete may agree to exclusively use one company’s product in exchange for money and free gear. In order to assess whether a contract is worthwhile, you have to determine if what you are giving up is worth what you are getting in return. Unfortunately, many of us allow excuses to take root without ever weighing the balance of what you give up versus what you receive.
The benefits to making an excuse are plain to see. First, you get to avoid something difficult that you do not want to do. You can tell yourself that it is too hot outside so that you do not need to get a run in or practice your serves. You can avoid getting up early to get a couple of practice sets in by convincing yourself that you stayed up too late the night before and you need your rest. The second benefit of an excuse is that you allow yourself an escape from the sting of failure. You didn’t really lose your last match, the line judge was blind and everyone knows it. It doesn’t matter that you missed nearly every shot hit to your backhand, your doubles partner couldn’t carry his weight anyway. The excuses you make provide you with temporary relief and deniability. But, at what cost?
When you make an excuse to avoid hard work, you are denying yourself the benefits of that hard work. This avoidance will not only limit your success, but will likely cause greater difficulty in the future. Say that you refuse to get a run in every morning because you wanted to sleep more. You will not have the necessary cardio for your next match. While you got a little extra sleep, you were not prepared and got destroyed in the later sets because you were simply out of shape. Moreover, when using excuses to cover up your shortcomings, you deny yourself the ability to learn from previous mistakes. In the instance of avoiding your inability to return a ball hit to your backhand due to the shortcomings of your doubles partner, you are only hindering your own ability to improve as a player by refusing to acknowledge where you have previously failed.
It is so easy to allow yourself to make excuses. However, you have to analyze what you are receiving versus what you are giving up in return. The temporary avoidance of pain and failure is nothing compared to what you can achieve through hard work and acknowledging your own shortcomings. Stop making excuses and start making improvements!