Excuses

During a recent conversation with someone, I was once again reminded of how often we use excuses for not addressing the real cause of our true dissatisfaction.  She was expressing her regret at not getting a good education when she was younger.  She continued with how she would have been able to have a better job, make more money, etc.  I stopped her in her tracks and asked, “and what would that give you?”  She looked at me like I was crazy, “well isn’t that enough?  A good job with a good salary?”

So often we blame our outer circumstances for our unhappiness.  There are a good number of people with an education, a good job with a good salary who are dissatisfied with life.  For someone who does not have much or comes from a place of hard work and not having much growing up, it seems like a dream come true.

It is so easy to rationalize our dissatisfaction.  I am unhappy because I don’t have X, or if I had Y, I’d be happy.  Such simplifications at best keep people motivated to go for more, and at worst makes them envious of those who have what they don’t.  Either way, it keeps them on a linear path of the object they are missing, close to achieving it or far away with no hope of getting there.  Such obsessions become part of their narrative and the way they look at life and interpret whatever is happening.

We all look out into the world through our own lens.  The more hardship we experience the thicker the lens gets.  At some point we cannot see without our glasses.  What if we looked at this example differently?

Imagine you have perfect vision and then something happens in your life or you have to live with a difficult situation, you start wearing glasses because you can only see what you think you want to see with those glasses.  Every opinion you form, every judgment you pass, every pain you endure becomes another layer between you and reality.  In time, what you think you see isn’t even close to the real thing.
 
If you find yourself making up excuses for what you are missing in your life or blaming others, or different circumstances for what you are experiencing, it is time to stop.  Take off your glasses and see what is really there.  You might find that the story you’ve been repeating in your own head was just that, a story, an old and irrelevant story.


It is time to step out of your story and start living!

Questions to ponder:
1)    What is the tape you keep on replaying in your head when you are dissatisfied with something?
2)    What is it that you think you need in order to be happy?
3)    Have you ever been completely satisfied?  What did it feel like?  How could you feel that way again?

Spiritual life coaching is an open-ended process that begins and ends where YOU need it to.  Maybe you hang on to excuses in a way that keeps you from moving forward in your life, or maybe it’s something altogether different.  Either way, if you think you could benefit from working with a spiritual life coach, contact me.