Designing Your Life, part I: Excuses

This week, I am helping teach the annual Designing Your Life class at MIT, taught by the Handel Group. It was through this class, 3 years ago, that I took my first step down the life coaching path that has now become my career. I remember sitting in the class and being blown away by the simplicity and power of Lauren's message... and the same sense of excitement and possibility is evident in the participants this year as well. As the course progresses, my goal is to use this blog to give you guys a taste of what we're playing with.

As a first homework, each participant evaluated the 18 areas of their life: career, body, community, relationship to yourself, bad habits, relationship, sex, romance, characteristics that don't work, family, money, time, home, organization, learning, fun and adventure, and spirtuality, and health. Yes, there are a lot of facets of your life, and in undertaking this exercise most people find that they have been ignoring a few of them. We ask partipants to evaluate where they are in each areas, what their ideal would be, and explain why they are not currently at their ideal.

One of the main reasons that we are not at our ideal is because we are caught up in the world of excuses. Clever inventions, excuses. They are the perfect device to get us off the hook for not doing what we know we should be doing. You know what I'm talking about... you are running late to a meeting, and in the five minutes before you burst through that door, your mind is churning through a dozen different excuses to justify your lateness. The subway took a while to come, I couldn't find the room, who picked this meeting time anyways... any excuse but the real reason you were late: I chose to sleep in an extra 10 minutes. Because really, if you give the real reason, you sound like a slounch. Ok, so this morning you actually were a slounch, but who wants to tell your coworkers that?

The problem with excuses is that over time, we start to believe them. We start to believe that it really was the subway, or the rain or whatever, and that the circumstances were out of our control. We lose sight of the power that we ultimately wield--in this case, the ability to set an alarm, get up, and arrive on time -- and begin to feel like our lives are, like the subway, out of our control.

Here are some of the brilliant excuses that our participants gave us this year... any of them sound familiar? I know I personally have been around the block on many of them. (Note that the participants signed a waver allowing annonymous re-use of their work):

On being overweight: I put on more than 15 pounds in the past year, it happened very gradually, and I saw it happening but I could never intervene (intervene in what? The civil war in Chad?)

On not keeping in touch with his family: I do not like to make phone calls at home because we have a very small apartment and any noise carries throughout the whole space, which makes it hard to talk without bothering each other. (weren't mobile phones invented for just this purpose?)

On being single: Very little flirting is directed my way, even though I seem approachable and available. (as if flirting were something that falls out of the sky... )

On a mediocre sex life: I don't really know how to make this area of my life better, as it involves changing another person's physiology (or psychology, but I don't know how to do that). (so she's the weak link, huh?)

On not having found the ideal career: There are too many options, and too much pressure to be 'successful.' (some would say that options are a good thing in finding the right fit...)

On not being able to refrain from swearing: When I was younger, I never voiced my anger or frustrations. I was quiet and held everything inside me. I always say the anger built up until it ended up spilling over and the swear words were the end result. (so when you said the word s*** a few minutes ago, it actually really originated decades ago, and is finally reaching us today? Like light from a star in a distant galaxy. Wow.)

The people who wrote these excuses are truly warriors... over the next few days, they are taking this stuff down. Controlling the hand that feeds the mouth, picking up the cell phone, sending out the flirt and the tease, listening to the heart, and cutting out the swears. Go guys, go!