How do you turn workplace excuses into opportunities and solutions?

When was the last time you heard your prospect, client, employee, supplier, referrer or business partner utter an excuse?

Are you tired of hearing: “I can’t afford it,” “I’m too busy” and so forth? Would you like to turn excuses into opportunities and solutions?

What are excuses?

You have probably heard lots of excuses in your business. Excuses take many forms – the economy, the weather, traffic, fears, self doubts, being tired, and the list goes on.

Prospects have probably said they do not have the money or the time to work with you, clients may have made excuses for delaying paying you for completed work or delay in implementing your advice recommendations, employees may have made excuses about being late for work, referrers may have excused themselves from referring more clients to you. It all sounds familiar.

Excuses are reflected in the language that we use. When you hear, “Yes, we can…, but..”, usually an excuse follows the “but”. When you hear, “I can’t….” or “It won’t….”, these are also excuses.

Underpinning these excuses are often unconscious beliefs that sabotage our success. For example, if someone consistently makes the excuse, “I can’t afford it”, after a while they may actually start to believe it. For them, it becomes their reality.

Their whole business and life revolves around ‘lack’ and that is what they keep creating for as long as they have that belief. They program their mind for ‘lack’ and ‘scarcity’, therefore, they miss seeing the opportunities as they present themselves.

Listen for excuses

Anytime you hear anyone rationalise why they do not have the result they want, they are making excuses for not having their result.

For example, “I did not reach my sales target this month because of the economy.” What is interesting is that in this economic environment, I have heard a number of salespeople say: “My sales are up this month because of the economy.”

Excuses are simply that, just reasons for not having the results that we want. What is also interesting is that once we stop making excuses, our results improve dramatically because we look for solutions.

When you buy into other people’s excuses, you are disempowering them and yourself at the same time. You keep them stuck in their problem by accepting their excuse and you become the facilitator of their excuses.

Once we stop buying into other people’s excuses, we become true leaders. We inspire and empower them and ourselves to succeed. You can either choose to buy other people’s excuses or to offer them solutions and possibilities to have what they want or need with your processes, services and ideas.

The benefits of being excuse-free

Excuses stop you from achieving your full potential and operating at your peak level of performance. When you are accountable to yourself and are excuse-free, you will attract people who are accountable, too. Like attracts like. However, if you find yourself making excuses, you will attract people who also make excuses.

Excuses take a lot of effort, focus and energy – it takes some creativity to come up with a different excuse each time. How much brain power, mental focus and energy did it take to create and come up with the excuses in the first place? Probably longer than it would have taken for you to do whatever you avoided doing in the first place.

Imagine the results you could achieve if you redirected that energy and mental focus towards generating creative solutions for your business.

Excuse yourself from excuses

Before you can stop buying other people’s excuses, first you need to stop making excuses yourself. The most successful people in business are unwilling to accept their own excuses.

Once you stop buying into your own excuses (including any negative self talk, self doubts, fears and beating up on yourself), it is a lot easier to stop accepting other people’s excuses because you are far more objective in coming up with solutions.

You are then in a much more resourceful state to handle other people’s objections and excuses, and empower them to see beyond those limitations to achieve success.