Excuses or Results

You can have excuses or you can have results but you can’t have both. You get to choose where you place your focus. You can put your attention on defending the reasons things haven’t worked out for you in the past or make excuses for why you’re not taking action or you can become results focused and view each piece of feedback as a step in the direction of your goal. I believe people can be divided into two broad groups. People who are excuse focused and those who are results focused. I meet people all the time who go to great lengths to try and convince me why they are not producing the results they want. They can go into intricate detail about all the roadblocks they face and how their inability to progress is due to a set of unique circumstances beyond their control.

What I know to be true is if someone is investing a lot of energy into making excuses, that is energy that is not going toward producing a more positive result. I am not saying that challenges, obstacles and roadblocks don’t exist – they do. We all face them almost everyday. So despite the fact we are confronted by challenges we can still exert control over how we view them. Do you choose to see obstacles as temporary and possible to overcome or as overwhelming and impossible to move past? You are the one in control of how you view a situation. Where you place your mental attention is where you go. Just as a racing car driver who begins to loose control of his vehicle and starts heading toward the wall, he's focus is not on the wall but instead he keeps his focus on where he wants to go – the race track. You move in the direction of your dominant thoughts.

When you place your attention on excuses there is only one thing that will happen. The size of the problem grows. The more you think about a problem the bigger it becomes until you now see a barrier so big you truly believe it is not even worth trying to progress and as a result you give up. A group of psychologists in the US conducted an experiment with a group of ice hockey players. The psychologists gave a test group of 100 players a picture and asked them to describe in as much detail as possible what they saw. The picture was of an ice hockey goalie standing in front of a goal in a defensive pose. Ninty percent of the players described the picture literally list things like who the goalie was, the team he played for the stadium, his number, uniform colour etc. But ten percent of the player described the picture very differently; their focus was not on the goalie, what they saw was all the places where they could score, under the arms, between his legs above his shoulders. What the researchers found especially fascinating was the fact that these players where also the highest scores in the league.

To live Ready Fire Aim you must keep our attention on what you want not what you don’t. Every time you defend an excuse you make it stronger, bigger and the task of overcoming it even more challenging. We all face challenges; no one sails through life without having to overcome obstacles. When you are next confronted by a problem acknowledge it is there and then switch your focus to finding a solution. You cannot eliminate a problem by focusing on it you can only make it bigger. So move yourself to solution mode as soon as you can. Your time on this planet is short, so don’t waste another minute of it making excuses and defending your position. Get moving, get excited, get focused and start producing the results you know you are capable of creating.