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Excuses, Excuses (Do You Have An Excuse Jar?)

By Will Turner

Do you have an excuse jar? If you don’t, maybe you should. An excuse jar is a way to mentally condition yourself to change your mindset and your behavior. You remember learning about Pavlov’s dogs, right?

Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist who is remembered for his landmark experiments on conditioning in the late nineteenth century. In his work, Pavlov studied the physiological response of different stimuli on dogs prior to eating. By using classical conditioning, Pavlov was able to trigger an instinctive response to a bell that caused the dogs to salivate.

The lesson for us is that, like dogs, our responses can be conditioned. Conditioning is a form of learning. We can learn to remove and eliminate excuses from our daily lives. This is how it works. Find a jar. One that holds about a quart or more is perfect. Now, make a sign or label that reads “No More Excuses” and tape it to the outside of the jar.

Once you have the jar, you fill it with money every time you make an excuse. The amount of money you choose to drop each time should be enough to make you not want to abstain from making excuses but within your means to actually do it. A dollar or five dollars is a good starting point.

Now, every time you catch yourself rationalizing your behavior, or lack thereof, with an excuse, you have to deposit money into your excuse jar. Only after you have not made excuses for 30 days are you able to retrieve your money. Please understand that you are to make a deposit to the excuse jar every time you fail to reach a goal and you rationalize your behavior with statements like, “I didn’t have time”, “The economy is bad so I couldn’t reach my goals”, “Betty in shipping didn’t get me the information”, “I’m too tired”, or any number of other finger-pointing rationalizations. An excuse simply means that you didn’t live up to your expectations, even if they were self-imposed.

So, do you get the picture? To improve performance, you have to perform. To perform, you have to overcome the obstacles that hold you back, whether they be internal or external obstacles. Anything less is just accepting excuses which is a real performance-killer.

© Dancing Elephants Achievement Group 2004