Excuse Landing Page - Celeste Stacey

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So... What's "excuse-addiction", anyway?

The truth is, we all make excuses. An excuse is our brain’s coping mechanism. It’s a way to get us out of distress and discomfort. So excuses do serve a purpose. Excuse-addiction happens when we allow ourselves to stay in situations that CAUSE us distress and discomfort!

Though the way we hear an excuse in our head is as unique as a fingerprint (even the same excuse can sound completely different in the minds of different people), one thing is common: When we are excuse-addicted, we start telling ourselves all the things we can’t do and all the things we are NOT. When we fail to make changes we know are needed, all our perceived limitations come rushing in to rescue us from ourselves. They come running to the rescue to save us from our responsibility to ourselves to make things happen.

Like a drug rushing into our veins, we feel better. We feel this strange wave of relief. We're wrapped in the warm, maternal embrace of our excuses and we close our eyes and try to shut out the guilt. Try to ignore the letdown we feel for letting ourselves down again. And we blame lack of intelligence, motivation, time, money, resources, support, trust, ability. Or worse, we tell ourselves we've got it all under control.

Excuse-addiction is an unproductive type of control. But we can beat it. Not with intelligence. Not with motivation alone. We need a breakthrough. It’s about getting into our brains and finding out the ways that we resist progress and finding out the ways that tension builds up in our bodies when we think about doing certain activities. Learning to break our individual pattern of excuses is the key to making our dreams happen.

The Anatomy of an Excuse

When certain challenges in life make us too uncomfortable, we lean hard on perfectly logical-sounding rationalizations that keep us stuck in a vortex I call, "excuse-addiction". The parts of that vortex are: EGO, Perfectionism and Misplaced Energy. The level of each varies by individual, but there's some of each component in us all. Together, they're like a Category 5 hurricane, feeding off each other, fueling heavy excuse-addiction, and inflicting massive damage to our progress. Check out the three short animated videos below to learn more (I love a good cartoon!) Or, if you'd rather read, scroll further down.

EGO (the ‘Eye’ of the hurricane). In Latin, Ego actually means “I”. It’s the center of circulation. The CORE of who we are. At our very center, when not pressured by expectations and external forces, we are at peace. In a hurricane, similar to our peaceful center, the ‘eye’ is the area of lowest pressure. There are clear skies and calm winds. However, let’s face it: It rarely stays that way. Work, kids, family, pressures, expectation… that’s when EGO runs wild! The collection of beliefs we have about ourselves starts to warp and spin out of control! Eventually, we hit a wall.

Enter the ‘eye wall’ of the hurricane. EGO, when met with pressure, is intense! In this state, we encounter the fiercest levels of self-doubt, hyper-sensitivity and comparison to others. Sound familiar? The foundation of excuse-addiction is being laid.

PERFECTIONISM (the ‘Central Dense Overcast’, or ‘CDO’, in hurricane speak.) The CDO is characterized as the mass of embedded clouds that comprise the inner portion of the hurricane. The CDO contains the ‘eye wall’, and the ‘eye’ itself. So does Perfectionism! Imagine being keenly aware of how you stack up to others’ expectations, and then setting out to achieve something BIG with ‘all eyes on you’. No WAY are you going to let yourself be seen ‘messy’, right?

Hey, did you just say “Right”? Uh-oh…

Guess what? A perfectionist mindset is like that mass of embedded hurricane clouds that skews our judgment and stops our progress. While others are imperfectly moving ahead, our need to get it ‘just right’ keeps us stuck in excuse-addiction. Oh, and by the way, just like a hurricane’s CDO is ‘perfectly’ symmetrical, in an excuse-addicted, ego-fueled mind, it has to be flawless or nothing!

MISPLACED ENERGY (the ‘Outflow’). This is the outer edge of a hurricane that’s a super-critical component of its development. The ‘outflow’ is all the energy being released by the hurricane. The more outflow, the more powerful the hurricane. With excuse-addiction, the energy we’re releasing is powered by that combination of ego (hyper-sensitivity) and perfectionism (clouded judgment). This means our energy is most likely misplaced. Our focus is way off. Misplaced energy feels like you're constantly running but not getting anywhere. Always working hard but not getting ahead. Or, seemingly not doing much at all but still feeling exhausted. Misplaced energy is like running full-speed in the wrong direction!

Imagine having to suffer through a hurricane! Every. Single. Day. Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? Well, that’s exactly what an excuse-addicted life feels like. As a recovering excuse-addict, I can attest to how it can absolutely drain your life! Excuse Breaker is all about helping us break that cycle, the myths that support it, and to take SMALL, SIMPLE ACTIONS EVERY DAY to create the life we want.