Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - Excuses or Results, You Can't have Both! | Clutterbug Podcast # 222

Episode Date: May 6, 2024

Do you often find yourself making excuses instead of taking action? In today's podcast, I'm going to give you some practical strategies to break this bad habit and become the hero of your own life! Get ready to feel motivated and empowered as you learn how to stop holding yourself back and start seeing real results. It's time to ditch the excuses and start living your best life! So tune in and let's get started!   You can find more Clutterbug content here: Website: http://www.clutterbug.me YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@clutterbug TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clutterbug_me Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clutterbug_me/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Clutterbug.Me/   #clutterbug #podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You can either make excuses or you can have results, but you can't have both. Hey, Clutterbugs, welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. I thought we'd have a really quick, fun, short and sweet podcast today talking about the habit of making excuses to get out of things. And definitely this is human nature. We all do it. But some people, maybe myself included, have a tendency to really do this all. all the time, constantly making excuses instead of doing the work. So in today's episode, we're really going to break down why we make excuses and strategies to break this bad habit. So we can actually

see results. Biggest reason why we make excuses is because procrastination, we feel guilty, procrastinating, but we also don't want to do the hard thing. And so an excuse gives us the ability to procrastinate but with reasoning to alleviate some of that, alleviate some of that shame and that guilt that comes with procrastinating. So we will find any reason to not do the thing we don't want to do. It's basically like we're talking ourselves into why it's okay or why we actually shouldn't do it. And if we really unpack this and unbury our excuses, most of the time it's not actually coming from lazy.

it's not coming from the fact that, oh, we just don't feel like doing it right now. More often, it's coming from a place of fear and anxiety, fear of the unknown, fear of making a mistake, that perfectionism mindset. And so we excuse ourselves from doing the hard, scary thing right now so that we tell ourselves we're waiting until we're better equipped to do it in the future. Or, yeah, we have, you know, more time or we have more money. or we have somebody to actually help us, or we have to do this before we can do that.

We don't want to go out of order. We don't want to create more work for ourselves. And we can be really convincing, right? We can really, that's what we're doing. We're convincing ourselves that our excuses are valid. But this can easily become a thought pattern that can become a habit that we don't even realize we're doing. and it's stopping us from seeing any progress in our lives at all.

I wanted to talk about this because it's really fresh in my mind. Not only do I make a lot of excuses, let's talk about me first before I throw strangers under the bus. I have been making so many excuses of why I can't work out. I was saying I didn't have time. I'm just way too crazy busy. By the time I actually do it or I can't in the mornings because I'll be sweaty and I've got to be on camera and I can't at night because I got to do all the housework because nobody helps me.

And on the weekends, I deserve to just relax and I'll do it, you know, when I have more time or have to take something out of my schedule. Like all these crazy reasons of why today's not a good day to work out. So yesterday was my first half an hour Zoom workout session with a personal trainer. I had, truth be told, rescheduled the two previous ones made an excuse of why I couldn't go. And she finally, yesterday afternoon sent me an excuse, sent me a text message. I mean, her text message said, you can have an excuse or you can have results, but you can't have both casts. And that was like, oh, I've been complaining about being out of shape and not being strong and wanting to work out for a literal years. Let's be honest, my entire life. And I constantly

have an excuse why. So yesterday there was no excuses. I mean, after that text, I couldn't make up some lie that I was planning on making up of why, or not even a lie, a reason and excuse of why I wasn't going to be able to make it. And the truth is I am busy and we're going on a cruise. We leave tomorrow. I'm not packed. I still have this podcast, another, I have so much to do, so much to do. and I have to write newsletters and copies and finish making thumbnails. And I'm way behind and I'm kind of panicking and I really should, you know, grocery shop for my mother-in-law is going to be staying here. But see all these excuses pouring out of my mouth that I was going to pour all over my personal trainer.

But I thought I can do 30 minutes. So I showed up for the 30 minutes. I hated it the entire time. But if I'm being honest, it flew by. not in the at the during the time it felt like it was lasting in eternity but then it's over and i still had like i didn't lose anything i didn't i didn't have to put anything aside i didn't miss out on anything there was no it didn't impact my night at all in a negative way in fact i felt even more motivated because i had done this big horrible thing that i've been putting off and it

wasn't that bad and I was proud of myself. I think I even probably got more done because I took the time to actually just stop making excuses and do the thing. And that was so eye-opening for me. I wanted to make this podcast, but also it had been on the back of my mind because I'm part of the Take Your House Back Group. You know, we just had the all-day live declutter. And, many people in this group made insane progress. But there were a few people who are posting in the comments. And I'm going to say this. And I'm saying this out of love because I've been there and I'm not trying to shame anyone at all. I just wonder if me pointing this out might be able to help people listening. And also, I think we all do this in some areas of our life. So maybe this resonates with you and maybe this can help you.

But there were a lot of people in the comments who obviously wanted to participate and didn't or want to declutter, but for some reason haven't. And they're posting their reasoning why in the group. They're posting their excuses of why they can't do the thing. And I mean, we don't know them. We're not expecting that it isn't like we know everybody's name and what they're doing. And, you know, we're monitoring people's progress. taking the time to post your excuse in the group is really coming from you're trying to convince

yourself, like appease yourself that this is the reason you haven't made progress either. You want the results. You do so badly. But you can't get them and this is why. And we're posting that in this group to really make yourself feel better. We're blaming external factors. and this is a terrible habit. Not only does this very easily become a victim mentality,

which means like, oh, poor me and I'm too sick, I'm too sore, nobody helps me. I don't have time. I don't have enough money. External factors that are out of your control are the reason that your life is the way that you are, and you're constantly in all situations kind of this victim and you can't do things. And I think this this is sort of self-preservation, isn't it? It's because we know we're not doing the things that we should be doing and the things we want to be doing, but we don't want to criticize ourselves and we don't want to like bruise our egos and admit that that it's our own.

our fault and we're to blame. So we shift the blame onto others and external factors. And it makes us feel better. It preserves our own self-image. And it makes us not feel as bad about ourselves. It does. But this like self-preservation that we're doing by making excuses and making, you know, we're the victim and it's everybody else's fault really comes at a cost of personal growth. Because we're not being accountable. If nothing, if everything in our life is out of our control and we have no say over anything, we're just going through the motions, then how can we ever grow? Not only as people, but how can we level up our life?

How can we do better if we're always just at the mercy of everyone and everything else? I think this habit that we get into, that victim mentality and this excuse habit is really a big contributor of why we're not happy with the life that we have. And we want it to be different. We don't understand that it's up to us. That instead of always being the victim, we have to be the hero of our own life. We have to rescue ourselves. No one is coming to rescue us. This isn't a Disney movie where we're trapped in a tower. We can't just cry, poor me.

We have to dust ourselves off and take action and take accountability and make the changes. We got to show up and work out. We can't make excuses. We got to do the thing. So how do we break this? Honestly, how do we break this horrible excuse? usemaking victim mentality habit. I think the first thing is definitely acknowledging that we do it.

And maybe deep down inside we know, but I wasn't really aware. I had convinced myself that I was sending these texts to my personal trainer of these reasons why I kept having to miss our lessons. I really convinced myself that these were real reasons. And it wasn't until she said that back. And it wasn't rude, but it was like you can either. have excuses or you can have results but you can't have both, that it kind of snapped me. It forced me to look at the situation, honestly, instead of through this lens of lies that I've

been wearing. So, yeah, I guess we can unpack more of like, why are we making excuses? Why do we not want to do this? Why do we? I don't know. I mean, I think my avoidance of, of working out doesn't come from a fear of failure, but maybe it does. Also, I, I just, I am. I'm, I'm, I'm real, real lazy. But then I'm doing all these other hard works. I like burned a bunch of boxes and did all these other things. Like, I had intentions of doing a lot of work, but the working out didn't feel like productive work. Ooh, maybe we're a digging, I'm digging something here. I do have this horrible personality trait that I'm trying to overcome of always having to, like, like tick things off a box, but in a productive way, be busy. And for some reason, I don't see

working out as that. I see it as work, but I don't see it as productive work. I see it as something that's just for me that doesn't give me instant tangible results. Oh, this is good. I got some things to work on here, friends. But I am curious if you ever do this excuse victim thing, what's your underlying fear or your underlying real rationality there? Like, if we dig deep under that, what are you afraid of? What are you avoiding? What's the worst thing that can happen? What if we don't make the excuse and we do the thing? Another thing that we can do is stop the overwhelmed because a lot of the times it's we avoid it. We make the excuses because it feels too big to jump in and we are our head is just spinning and we are in full flight or fight mode.

So we just make an excuse to appeal our ego to make ourselves, ah, it's okay. It's okay. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. These are all the reasons you can't do that hards carry thing. It's okay. But what if we broke that hards carry thing into like little tiny chunks? so it didn't feel so bad. Here's a really good example. Again, I don't mean to be rude and I certainly don't mean to shame anyone, but a lot of the excuses that I see in the group are I don't have, I'm too tired to declutter anything. I don't have the physical energy to remove anything from my home. I can't, I just can't declutter because I'm just, I don't, I physically am way, too wiped to be able to do it. And the truth is, you can throw things in a trash bag sitting down.

And the other side of that is you had the energy to bring it into your home. You're bringing in groceries. You're still going out and doing things. A lot of these people work full-time jobs. So the excuse of, I'm too sick. I'm too tired. I'm too weak. To be able to just put a couple things in a trash bag isn't really true. You're probably too sick, too tired, too weak to declutter your entire house right now to carry out 10 tons of things today. That is true. But you are not too tired, too sick, too weak to fill one trash bag. So when we break things down into manageable chunks, it makes it harder to make excuses to avoid it. So that's another thing we can do.

And the other thing that I think is something that we can do to help us overcome the excuse making is to be honest with other people in our lives that we love. Or complete strangers that are our personal trainers. I showed up for the workout and worked my butt off because I, felt like I had to be accountable to my personal trainer. And when I really think about any time in my life that I tackled things I didn't really want to do, like write a book, at first I didn't want to do it, but my editor requested a chapter every week. So I was accountable to him. What if we reach out to someone in our life and say, listen, I'm trying to overcome the excuse making. I'm trying to overcome

I'm always like dodging the work and making reasons of why I can't do things. This is what I want to do by this date. Can you hold me accountable? Can you help me not make excuses? Can you help push me so that I don't keep getting into this habit of just trying to get out of it? Because it doesn't mean that we're not going to still try to do that. But I think somebody else reminding us of that's what we're doing is important. I wasn't even realizing that that's what I was doing with the personal trainer every time I canceled on her.

I didn't even realize. I knew I was canceling on her. But I didn't realize that I was just making up stupid excuses that didn't matter because the truth is I just really didn't want to do it. I had convinced myself of all of these things. And I was falling into this victim mentality of poor me. I have so much on my plate. My husband's not helped. I can never get it done. I'm not going to get ready for the cruise and I'm not going to help.

Poor me, poor me. I've got to do all this work. I've got to get all these things done. All of which wasn't really true. Half an hour to work out was more important than any of those little stupid things on my list. Think about your life. What is something that you really want to do and you've been putting off and you've been making excuses why? what is that thing what are the excuses you tell yourself and are those excuses real can you have somebody hold you accountable can you hold yourself accountable and try really hard to break this habit for good because it is a habit the victim mentality and the excuse making both of those, we can change. We have the power to change by identifying the thought, catching it,

and doing the hard thing anyways, being the hero instead of the victim. You got this, friends. Just a quick little podcast today. Another thing that you can do that helped me with my sort of negative thought pattern was a gratitude journal. I know, boo. Nobody wants to do it. but just having a pad of paper or a notebook beside your bed and setting an alarm the time you normally go to bed five minutes before that to remind you to write down three to five things you're really grateful for today. They can be small, silly things. They can be like, dinner was delicious, or I got everything done, or I feel good even though I didn't get everything done, or I love my sister and I had a great talk with my mom or my kids got a good report card. I don't know what yours is,

this literally rewires our brain and helps us naturally without thinking like subconsciously have more positive thoughts than negative thoughts which makes us a more positive person and when we are a more positive person in a more positive state of mind it's very hard to also be a victim and feel sorry for ourselves and woe is me everything's everyone else's fault why is everything so hard oh i can never do anything or get anything done because X, Y, Z, it's all out of my control. It's very hard to think that way when we genuinely are happy and grateful with the life that we have. And we can, it doesn't matter. Your life could be Skid Row right now. You will find things and you can find things to be happy and grateful for. And a gratitude journal is an amazing way to do that. So thank you guys.

quick one today, love hanging out with you, and I'll see you guys next time.