5 Ways to Ditch Your Excuses and Go All In on Your Goals
Excuses kill dreams… EVERY SINGLE TIME.
To become someone that you have never been before, you must do something that you have never done before. — Brian Tracy
Who are you being at this present moment?
Who have you chosen to be for the last five years?
How much of that has been grounded in your excuses?
Your excuses are keeping you small.
Every time you focus on why you can’t do what you want to do, on how little time you have to focus on the goals and dreams you really want to focus on, on the lack of this resource or that resource to help you move your life forward, you’re creating a future that you aren’t going to want to live once you get there.
And the problem is that most people see excuses as “reality.”
This is how it is…
I don’t have enough hours in the day…
I have responsibilities so I can’t just get up and pursue my dreams…
I’ve screwed up so many times before. How will this time be any different?
When life calms down, I’ll go back to it…
Sound familiar?
As rational as all of your excuses may seem, here’s the truth:
You’ve made quitting a habit and going the easy way your life.
It’s tough to hear that when someone else says it but it’s true.
If you’re not living the life you want, it’s because you settled for shortcuts, live in a comfort zone and took the easy way out by blaming other people and circumstances for why you are where you are. You’ve made average your life and you’ve gotten comfortable living there.
You can turn this around today.
It begins with ditching your excuses… ALL of them.
Before you can rise to your greatest capacity, you have to destroy the things that keep you mediocre and your excuses are at the top of that list.
Here are 5 ways to ditch your excuses and go all in on your goals:
1 Pick the hard way EVERY single time
We’re used to immediate gratification. We love the dopamine hits of social media approval. We can get fast food in a few minutes, order everything online, and have a driver take us some place with a handy app on our phones. Most people have no idea what ‘hard’ is… and when hard arrives, they run from it like the plague. Rather than sitting in the comfort of going the easy route, make yourself do at least one thing every day that is totally and completely HARD for you. It doesn’t have to be big.
Here are a few examples: a cold shower, working out for twenty minutes longer than normal, cooking a meal entirely from scratch, learning a language, fixing something in your house or assembling furniture when you are the furthest thing from handy, sending an email that makes you super uncomfortable, picking up the phone and calling someone you know you need to talk to but have been postponing talking to for months.
Get yourself into the groove of doing at least one HARD thing a day. This will help you develop the habit of doing hard things and, before long, that will be the way you move through life- constantly challenging yourself to step out of and thrive outside of your comfort zones.
2 Commit to a No Whining or Complaining Zone of Life
Pay attention to how much you whine or complain (internally and externally). Decide today that this part of your life is done and over with. Complainers lose EVERY single time. If you’d like to stop losing, make a commitment to stop complaining. Yes, it’ll be hard to figure out what to say to yourself and others when you decide to stop whining but, in the long run, it’ll produce a very different life, namely, the life that you really want.
3 Make yourself wait
There’s a quick fix for everything… and we love to get things fast and easy. Don’t have the money to buy a car cash? Get a car loan. Don’t have the money to purchase a piece of exercise equipment? Put it on a credit card. Don’t like the extra belly fat you have? Get liposuction. The problem with all of that is very simple: What you don’t work for, you don’t value. That’s why lottery winners (who win millions and millions) go broke all the time. Until you can learn the power of delayed gratification, you will never master the ability to go all in and stay all in until you get to the goal.
Make yourself wait for simple things. You want a new car? Decide to buy it cash and do the hard work of making the money to buy it cash. Want to go on a trip around the world but also have the goal of having six months worth of savings in your bank account? Force yourself to get the six months in the bank before you even look at a travel website. Want to drop twenty pounds? Every meal is an opportunity to ask yourself, “Is what I’m eating a reflection of what I want now or what I want long term and what am I willing to do to compensate for the food choice I’m making right now?” Maybe you’re okay with 60 extra minutes of cardio for ONE Snickers bar… and maybe you’ll decide to eat 2 Hershey kisses instead plus a salad. Make yourself wait for the things that matter so you build the habit of playing the long game (instead of giving in to the short wins).
4 Do more than you think you can do
Let’s say you work on a project for two hours a day and you’re used to that two hours a day. Double it to 4 hours and make yourself do the entire four hours… or if you’re building a business and you invest 6 hours a day in that business because, in your mind, “That’s all I can do with the other commitments in my life”, take a good, hard look at your calendar and find an extra hour every single day and make yourself do it. At the end of the day, you need to be able to go to bed saying that you demand more from yourself than ANYONE else cold ever demand of you. If you can say that, your excuses have no room to breathe.
5 Operate from the End but only focus on the Now
Seems like a conflicting message, right? It is and it isn’t.
On the one hand, to ditch your excuses, you’ve got to see yourself at the finish line and embody ALL of who you have to be to get there now. On the other hand, you have to be fully present in the Now, putting WHOLE mind into PRESENT action now and doing that with all that you have… until you get to the goal. You’ve got to stop counting how long it’s been or how much farther you have to go and, instead, take action today with absolute certainty that you’re going to get to where you say you want to go tomorrow. It’s a fine line but you can walk it. Be the YOU that has already achieved the goal and use all of the power of that YOU to do all the work of today.
Conclusion
So long as your excuses limit your life, you’ll lack the tenacity and energy to go after your biggest dreams. Your excuses are not protecting your from life; they are keeping you from it. Every choice you make today will either be a choice to transcend a limitation or to reinforce one. You CAN get rid of your excuses. Decide to do that today…
Ready to take massive action and achieve your biggest goals?
I’ve created a cheat sheet that will teach you how to take daily massive action in the presence of fear, doubt and shame. Follow the cheat sheet and you’ll change the game on your dreams and on your life.
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