Day 202- What Your Excuses are Telling You

I recently sat in on an Eqafe interview and an interesting thing happened. I wasn’t feeling tired before the interview began, but as I was listening I had to fight to stay awake. At one point I was even dreaming with my eyes open. What this indicates is that I was hearing information that my mind did NOT want to hear or accept, like a self-preservation/defense mechanism. Which is interesting because that was the topic of the interview.

The interview was discussing the tendency we have to justify, excuse or limit ourselves to remain a certain way or in a certain personality or habit. For example, I had been facing the point of being shy in a group. I always accepted this as a part of me or of my personality that was unchangeable, and I would  justify remaining this way by telling myself that certain experiences I had had in my life had formed me and now this is how I am. The memories of being bullied or embarrassed in front of a group would come back to haunt me and create a fear or resistance, so in the same or similar situations I would withdraw within myself and want to become invisible, trying to avoid having this memory replay.

So what is happening here is that the mind is using memories to defend this original self-definition or belief, in order to keep up the ‘shyness’ personality and all the reactions that go with that. This is instead of the common sense approach of the person having an experience, learning from it and changing through letting it go and trying something new.

In this, we can see that nothing of us is set in stone, everything is changeable, and we can learn, grow and evolve. But we use excuses based on past memories to justify why we can’t change, and how impossible it is to grow, learn and evolve. This is an important realization, because next time I see myself saying: “I’m this way because…..” or “I can’t do that because…”, I know these are red flags showing me that I am at a moment of opportunity, where I can simply bypass the justifications and excuses, and walk into a new situation with a ‘blank slate’, to really experience what I am in fact capable of.

 

Self-Study with support, learn to respect you and others, learn how to stop mind chatter, learn how to forgive so effectively that you actually change forever, learn how to stop and change the automatic thoughts that run your life --Sign up for the free course at this link: DIPLITE, try it for yourself .