Five years ago, Marilyn decided to leave her soul-squashing job and start a business that would share her love of animals. Today she’s still dragging herself to that same job and her entrepreneurial enthusiasm is weak from neglect.

When questioned about her business plans, she replies, “Oh, I decided in this economy it was better to hang on to what I had. Besides I hate to give up my benefits and I really need the money from my job so I can remodel my family room.”

What Marilyn—and so many others— demonstrate is that whenever we ignore our dreams we rationalize it by creating a villain. It’s never our fault, for goodness sake. Someone or something outside us is standing in our way.

That thinking leads us to look for the villain which is often disguised as an excuse.

Since finding an excuse is not a creative exercise, most excuses aren’t too original. Knowing that, syndicated columnist Dale Dauten put together the Excuse-O-Matic which can be a handy tool.

Just find your age and under it you’ll find the corresponding excuse not to take a risk.

Under 30—too young

Need to get established/planning marriage/ kids/house

No experience/no credit/no capital

30 to 40—too busy

Have spouse/children/mortgage

Too much credit/need to save for college tuition

40 to 55—too stretched

Kids in college

Need to pay down debt/save for retirement

Over 55—too tired

Not up on latest technologies

Too late to risk capital

Concerned about losing retirement benefits

Deceased—too dead

The final and best excuse

Now I’m not a mathematician, but I can see that if you add up these excuses all you’re left with are excuses.

If you want to amaze and dazzle yourself,  give up, once and for all, anything that sounds like an excuse.

Giving up all excuses is not enough, however. In the part of your brain where you’ve stored reasons and excuses, start building an Option Bank.

An Option Bank, just like the place where you store money, is a repository of good ideas, dreams and goals. Like an ordinary bank, the more you put in, the more you can draw out.

The best way to get started at this is to convince yourself that there is never just a single option available. Never. If you begin with that premise, your creative spirit will be free to go to work.

A word of warning: this is not the same as the frequently used expression, “I’m keeping my options open,” which usually means, “I have no idea what I want and am waiting for something to happen to tell me.”

What I’m talking about is a proactive listing of any and every possibility that occurs to you.

Another key to building your Option Bank comes from Harry Browne in his book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. “As you view any situation in which you have a goal,” Browne writes, “there are basically two types of alternatives available to you. I call them direct and indirect.

“A direct alternative is one that requires only direct action by yourself to get a desired result. An indirect alternative requires that you act to make someone else do what is necessary to achieve your objective.”

On a blank sheet of paper, draw a line down the center. At the top of the page, write a goal that you have in the form of an affirmation. Over the left hand column write Excuses and over the right hand column write Options.

Think of your excuses as debits and your options as deposits. Now write your lists. If you can’t simply ignore your excuses, what direct alternative can you take to eliminate or change them?

When you repeat this exercise regularly, you’ll discover that your Option List will grow while your Excuses List will shrivel.

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” Anais Nin wisely observed.

Keep building your own Option Bank and you’ll discover that life not only shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage, but also in proportion to one’s options.

 

Yesterday afternoon I spent a fair amount of time replying to an e-mail from a man who wrote to tell me that he was tired of his corporate job and wanted to become self-employed. So far, so good.

Then he went on to give me all the reasons why this was impossible. He had a large family to support, he was too exhausted when he got home from work to get something going, etc. etc. There wasn’t anything very original about his list.

I wrote back and said, “Just from what you told me, I think you may be getting ahead of yourself. Of course, it seems overwhelming to make a life transition when you’re already booked and committed.

“Do you have a clear idea about what sort of business you’d like to start? Can you find even 30 minutes a day to start laying the groundwork? Have you got written goals? Can you get family support for making a lifestyle change? Seems to me, your next step is to plan your transition…not decide it can’t be done.”

What I wanted to tell him, but didn’t, was that he called to mind Richard Bach’s observation: “Argue for your limitations and, sure enough, they’re yours.”

I had barely hit the send button on my message when my phone rang. The call was from Paul, a man I’d met several years ago when he attended my seminars in San Francisco.

At the time, Paul was working at a government job, not so happily married, and longing to travel. I remember how somber and sad he seemed.

When I heard from him next, he had quit his job, left his bad marriage and was focusing on making his living from travel.

It was fun to watch as Paul began building his business teaching various travel seminars he’d created. At first, he focused on teaching in his home state of California. The next year he went national and was zipping around the country sharing information on living abroad and getting the most out of traveling like a local.

When Paul’s parents became ill, he suspended his travel activities to care for them. In the past year, both his mother and father had died and Paul is planning his next chapter.

He told me about his immediate plans to study French in Montreal and spend time on a Semester at Sea.  As he was sharing his excitement about his new adventures, I kept thinking about my e-mail correspondent who felt so trapped.

Cynics would point out that Paul does not have the same obligations as the other fellow so, obviously, he can gallivant around. Cynics would be missing the point.

In our long catch-up chat, Paul told me that he really didn’t have any long-term plans. He was focusing on his upcoming travels. “I’m not worried. Having the experience of starting my business gave me so much confidence,” he said, “that I know I can do it again.”

It’s an observation I’ve heard over and over again from my self-employed friends. Why then, I wonder, is Paul’s discovery such a well-kept secret? And why do so many people treat self-employment like a spectator sport?

Maybe the answer to those perplexing questions can be found in these words from an anonymous source: A willing heart will find a thousand ways. An unwilling heart will find a thousand excuses.

Or perhaps Paul has discovered what Chris Rock pointed out in an interview last week on CBS Sunday Morning. “Being rich is not about having a lot of money,” Rock said. “Being rich is about having a lot of options.”

 

If you’ve met me or seen my picture, you may have noticed that I am blessed with hair that’s straight as a ruler. Unfortunately, when I was a little girl, Toni home permanents came up with a solution—Tonette for children.

After it appeared on the market, my mother enthusiastically administered this smelly monstrosity to my hair at regular intervals. When I would protest, she’d remind me, “You must suffer to be beautiful.”

It became one of my mother’s favorite mantras and I suspect the message spilled over into other areas of life. How dare I feel proud about any accomplishment that came easily?

While I no longer believe that suffering is a necessity when it comes to personal achievement, I do know that worthwhile endeavors usually involve a challenge—or several.

Nevertheless, I suspect that too many of us continue to make things harder than necessary when we’re going for a dream.  I also suspect that we’re often unaware of those behaviors that slow us down and add drudgery.

How can we be sure we’re making it harder than it needs to be? Here are five surefire ways that can burden the entrepreneur’s journey.

1. Avoid investing in ourselves. Anyone who starts a business signs up for a learning adventure, but those who never bother to attend a seminar or travel to a conference are making their own success a low budget priority.

And it’s not just information that needs to be acquired. As author Earnie Larsen points out, “You can’t outperform your own self-image.”

For most of us, acquiring a healthy self-image requires an investment of time, money and assistance from pros.

2. Pamper our excuses. We’ve all got them and when we repeat them often enough, they begin to feel welcome.

That’s only a short step away from believing them. The moment we do that, our excuses assume a position of power.

It’s hard to move ahead when our excuses have lodged themselves around our ankles.

3. Never ask for help. In a recent post, Seth Godin said, “Too often, businesses (and freelancers) focus on making it on their own. In fact, the secret of being indispensable is making it together.”

Colorado Free University founder John Hand believed that for everyone who has a problem, someone in the community has the solution. Whether the community is geographic or virtual, we make it harder for ourselves if we fail to find those helpful resources and listen to their advice.

4. Ignore the successful. The world is full of people who are willing to share their experiences, lessons and techniques.

The best way to keep from following in their footsteps is to avoid putting yourself in their presence to begin with, but should you find yourself in the same room, use it as an exercise to compare yourself to them rather than learn from them.

5. Scorn inspiration. One of the best kept secrets around is that inspiration is available to all of us, but it needs to be cultivated. In order to do that, we need to know what inspires us—and take ourselves to those people and places on a regular basis.

As Mary Pipher observes, “Inspiration is very polite. She knocks quietly and if  we don’t answer, goes elsewhere.”

Inspiration, even at its quietest, helps us to feel more brilliant, more creative, more capable. When we undervalue it, we rob ourselves of its gifts.

It’s so much harder to succeed if we haven’t invited inspiration along as a companion.

Years ago when I first learned about goal setting, one of the first written goals I set for myself was to never have two years that were exactly the same. I suspect that goal was inspired by my realization that my teaching job seemed to produce years that were nearly a carbon copy (you do remember carbon copies, don’t you?) of one another.

That goal popped into my mind again a couple of weeks ago when I sat down to shred the papers and receipts from 2002. As I discovered, it was a year quite unlike 2010, which has also been a remarkable year, but in very different ways.

As I looked through the travel documents, I wondered if I had spent any time at home that year. There were trips to Seattle, Toronto, Boston and many spots in between. My passport also had a bit of a workout on two trips to London and another to Italy with my sister and daughter.

This was a year of some unique experiences and firsts. A few days ago, I wrote about the explosion at my daughter’s apartment building that happened that year. Most of the big highlights of 2002 were less dramatic.

Memories of that year were lurking in the checks I was shredding. I noticed it was one I’d written for the down payment on my Saturn, the first brand new card I’d ever purchased. I smiled remembering the day that I surprised myself by buying that car without so much as a test drive.

Then there was that birthday party I threw for myself in Las Vegas. That little celebration, almost planned as a joke, led to several surprising adventures, not the least of which was changing my notions about this city.

As I was reviewing 2002 via my paperwork, I thought of the advice I once heard (and frequently quote) about the simple, but foolproof, test you can use to see if your life is in alignment with your priorities.

That advice? Look at your calendar and checkbook. You can quickly see if you are spending your time and money in ways that support the things that matter to you.

Sadly, for many people there’s a big discrepancy between what they know they want to do and have and what they actually are spending their time and money on.

I’ve recently finished Chris Guillebeau’s wonderful new book The Art of Non-Conformity. Chris set a big goal for himself to visit every country in the world before he turns 35. He’s well on his way, as his legion of followers can attest.

Chris writes eloquently about the importance of determining your own values and then creating a life that lives up to those values. Of course, he also encounters many people who tell him they’d just love to do what he’s doing, but, of course there are abundant reasons and excuses why that’s simply not possible.

Ah, excuses. Seems to me that you can have excuses or you can have your dreams, but you can’t have both.

Those faulty explanations that attempt to explain our disappointments do not create extraordinary years. You certainly can’t experience the rewards of the joyfully jobless life, either, if excuses are running the show.

I’m already thinking about several new adventures that I plan to use to weave 2011. It’s not just a change of address that’s going to make it a different year for me.

And I’m starting that plan with this bit of advice from Chris Guillebeau: “I propose welcoming in a life of abundance, filled to the brim with things you enjoy doing and that leave a legacy.”

Of course, I’m the only one who can determine what that means for me and that’s just fine. My calendar and checkbook are going to make sure that I stay on track so when it is time to shred 2011 I’ll remember it as a year that was filled to the brim.

Five years ago, Marilyn decided to leave her soul-squashing job and start a business that would share her love of animals. Today she’s still dragging herself to that same job and her entrepreneurial enthusiasm is weak from neglect. When questioned about her business plans, she replies, “Oh, I decided in this economy it was better to hang on to what I had. Besides I hate to give up my benefits and I really need the money from my job so I can remodel my family room.”

What Marilyn demonstrates is that whenever we ignore our dreams we rationalize it by creating a villain. It’s never our fault, for goodness sake. Someone or something outside us is standing in our way. 

Since finding an excuse is not a creative exercise, most excuses aren’t too original. Knowing that, syndicated columnist Dale Dauten put together the Excuse-O-Matic which can be a handy tool. Just find your age and under it you’ll find the corresponding excuse not to take a risk.

Under 30—too young

Need to get established/planning marriage/ kids/house

No experience/no credit/no capital   

30 to 40—too busy

Have spouse/children/mortgage

Too much credit/need to save for college tuition    

40 to 55—too stretched

Kids in college

Need to pay down debt/save for retirement

Over 55—too tired

Not up on latest technologies

Too late to risk capital

Concerned about losing retirement benefits

Deceased—too dead

The final and best excuse

Now I’m not a mathematician, but I can see that if you add up these excuses all you’re left with are excuses. If you want your life to take on a fresh luster, if you want to amaze and dazzle yourself,  make a pact with yourself to give up, once and for all, anything that sounds like an excuse. Giving up all excuses is not enough, however. In the part of your brain where you’ve stored reasons and excuses, start building an Option Bank.

An Option Bank, just like the place where you store money, is a repository of good ideas, dreams and goals. Like an ordinary bank, the more you put in, the more you can draw out. The best way to get started at this is to convince yourself that there is never just a single option available. Never. If you begin with that premise, your creative spirit will be free to go to work. 

A word of warning: this is not the same as the frequently used expression, “I’m keeping my options open,” which usually means, “I have no idea what I want and am waiting for something to happen to tell me.” What I’m talking about is a proactive listing of any and every possibility that occurs to you.

On a blank sheet of paper, draw a line down the center. At the top of the page, write a goal that you have in the form of an affirmation. Over the left hand column write Excuses and over the right hand column write Options. 

Think of your excuses as debits and your options as deposits. Now write your lists. If you can’t simply ignore your excuses, what direct alternative can you take to eliminate or change them? When you repeat this exercise regularly, you’ll discover that your Option List will grow while your Excuses List will shrivel.

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” Anais Nin wisely observed. Keep building your own Option Bank and you’ll discover that life not only shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage, but also in proportion to one’s options.

Our duty is to proceed as if  limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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I have two  teleclasses coming up. One will help you eliminate excuses and the other will help you create options.