A Slice of Lemon :: Tips... with a Twist!

When things go wrong, we like to be able to explain what happened. But when we use the same explanation more than a few times, or as a way of masking our part in the unsuccessful event, they are actually thinly disguised excuses. Explanations empower, excuses cripple.

“Let’s see… take responsibility for my own life, or blame you… Ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!!! ‘Blame you’ wins hands down!”

So says Mike Yagoobian who, in case you’re not a fan of Pixar Animation, is a character in “Meet the Robinsons”. If you’ve seen the movie, I’ll let you skip the next two paragraphs if you really want to. If you’ve not, then stick with me as I explain…

Mike is a kid in an orphanage, and shares a room with Lewis. Lewis is a bit of a genius who invents things and tends to work whenever he gets an idea, which includes at night. As a result, Mike keeps getting his sleep interrupted and all this finally comes to a head when Mike’s Little League baseball team loses a match because Mike dozed off and missed a vital catch.

Many years later, Mike is all grown up and has lived a life filled with failure, bitterness and rejection. Using a stolen time machine (yes, I know, but you should watch the movie!) he visits his old room with the young Lewis and rants on about how his failed life is all Lewis’ fault. Lewis points out that Mike’s failed life is more likely the result of always focusing on the few bad things that happened and refusing to take opportunities to “keep moving forward”.

(Incidentally, the “keep moving forward” is the underlying message of the movie, inspired by a quote from Walt Disney, and is a very powerful principle.)

OK, those who skipped the paragraphs can now join in again as we move on with my thought(s) for this month.

Whenever we fail, don’t get the results we intended to or get the response from others that we wanted, we can give ourselves and those around us one of two things – an EXPLANATION or an EXCUSE.

So what’s the difference between the two then, between explanation and excuse?

Well, here’s my offering; read on then decide for yourself from those parts of your own experiences that reflect what you’ll have read.

A true and genuine EXPLANATION requires a little reflection to find the chain of thoughts, decisions and actions that led up to the event in question, some exploration perhaps.

All an EXCUSE requires is that you find someone or something else you can blame for your lack of success.

An EXPLANATION provides you a foundation to build at least one alternative course of action you could take to get closer to achieving what you want next time around.

An EXCUSE, on the other hand, provides only a comfy parking spot for you to ease into and stop trying anymore, or just to accept less than what you intended.

However, we need to be careful here as explanations and excuses can sound very similar, so the big difference that makes the difference is actually WHAT YOU DO WITH IT NEXT. If you do nothing, i.e. don’t modify your thoughts, decisions or actions and then make another attempt, what you gave yourself (or someone gave you) was an excuse; yes, it really is as simple as that!

Sometimes the distinction is quite subtle though, and you have to listen to yourself or others quite carefully to distinguish explanation from excuse. Take, for example, these two sentences:

· I didn’t have time to do it

· I didn’t make time to do it

Which of those two do you think is the excuse?

Well, they both have the potential to be used as excuses, but the first one would be the easiest because using the word “have” implies somehow that time is something that I’m not in control of, that somehow the great time-distributors of the universe didn’t give me enough, so it’s actually their fault, not mine.

The second sentence there is leaning much more towards an explanation because the implication there is that my time is mine to choose what to do with, i.e. that it was my decisions that led to me not doing whatever it was, i.e. it was MY RESPONSIBILITY.

In that “make time” there’s also the presupposition that I now know something I can change, I have an alternative course to take to prevent that mistake happening again, whereas if I “don’t have time” because time is not under my control, I can’t correct the mistake either.

These excuses crop up everywhere, including “It was an accident!” (better explained in most cases as “I wasn’t paying enough attention”), “I didn’t mean to hurt you!” (better explained by “I didn’t think it through enough first”), and “They made me do it!” (perhaps better explained by, for example, “I didn’t say ‘No.’”) – I’m sure you can come up with examples you may have heard or even used yourself.

Now I know that some of you will be thinking and feeling that I’m being too harsh, too black-and-white here. To you I’ll ask this question: Which point of view is more empowering, more likely to mean I take more and more responsibility for my own life, my own successes, and sorting out my own mistakes – the excuse motorway or the explanation path?

And yes, even in extreme examples where people have suffered through potentially emotionally (or physically) crippling events, the explanation vs. excuse see-saw still holds true; you can use those past events to define your future, focus on them, let them fester and grow, or you can use those past events as an explanation for why things have been the way they have up until now, but then seek help and decide on a course of action for the future.

For example, I had the privilege of working alongside a guy who woke up from an operation paralysed from the neck down due to complications in surgery. He could have given up and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, using that incident as an excuse. Instead he spent the next few years in physiotherapy, pushing himself to learn to walk again, and succeeded in amazing everyone around him with his determination and the degree of his success.

One of my elderly neighbours suffers with cripplingly painful arthritis and, by most people’s standards would be perfectly justified in living on pain-killers and spending all day not moving. But she doesn’t – in her words she “won’t use it as an excuse to stop living”, and still cleans, does the gardening and walks a mile round-trip to the local shops a few times a week.

So, take a moment to think next time you’re about to come up with why things didn’t quite go the way you wanted or intended and decide to reward yourself by avoiding empty excuses and come up with a genuine explanation that you can then do something with. And you can help others to do the same too.


	February 2008 : No. 40

Explanation or Excuse?