Making Excuses

Ever since Adam and Eve people have been making excuses for their behavior.

Excuses come in all sizes and types, but they all boil down to one common element.

A lack of personal responsibility!

Yes, a lack of individuals taking responsibility for their own actions.

We have all heard of it and speaking for myself I have even participated in the old game called "The Blame Game".

In the Garden of Eden, Eve blamed eating the apple on Satan, and Adam blamed God for giving him Eve. Wow.

So who do you commonly try to blame.

Kids are great at the blame game and excuses. She touched me first! He made me do it! Everyone else is doing it! Why do you always make me do it? You never punish Him for doing it! On and on and on it goes and where it stops is generally in a bad spot.

Ask them to clean their room and get ready for a barrage of great excuses. They must sell a book of excuses for this one somewhere in the children's section, because they all come up with so many reasons why they can't clean their room now. Somewhere in most of them is the word 'Later".

How about do your home work!

As adults we make excuses to get out of doing things. We make excuses to justify things. We make excuses to avoid problems, or at least we think. We make excuses because we are lazy.

After all if it is our fault then we have to do something about it. We even call alcoholism a disease now. Now I can buy into the idea that some people have a tendency to have a more additive personality, but I can't remember anyone ever pouring cancer down their throats. By calling it a disease we are able to feel better about the problem. Almost like they couldn't help it! They don't have to take personal responsibility for the behavior if we call it a disease.

Now I'm not picking on alcoholics. My point is that we are all looking for excuses so that we don't have to take personal responsibility for what ever it is.

Good thing God didn't give us more fingers because I'm sure we would use them to point at someone else.

Another challenge!

Being a good parent means that not only do we have to take personal responsibility for ourselves, but we have to hold our children personally responsible for their behavior as well. Don't let them make excuses!

By holding them responsible for the little things early in their lives, it may help them to understand and avoid the pain they may experience by bad behavior later in their adult life.

Here are just some examples.

Learning early in life that talking back to your parents or adults will result in consequences could help them avoid talking back to their boss or police officer later on. I think that the consequences you dish out will be somewhat less painful in the end than the loss of a job or time in jail.

If you pass it off as just a phase their going through you're hurting them. If you love your child then make the effort to correct poor behavior as early as you can. If you don't it just gets harder and harder!

Make sure the consequences are age appropriate and never issued in anger.

So stop the vicious circle of the "Blame Game!"

We use to refer to taking personal responsibility for something in the Marine Corps as 'Falling on the Sword". In short it means that even if it kills you, do the right thing! Be someone of honor! A coward blames everyone else but themselves!

I have tried to live by that standard, but on occasion I have failed. But the standard is still there.

I remember several years ago I was in charge of a large unit. Included in this were keys to every office on a very large campus. As luck would have it all the keys were stolen one night from the security key box. The reason they were stolen was that the system we had in place had numerous flaws in it. After I reviewed the entire system I discovered that I should have known that it was set up to fail. Although I risked being fired for not recognizing the problem prior to this and correcting it, I reported that I had failed in my duties to discover and correct it. I was in charge and I took the blame as it should be.

I was not fired nor even disciplined for the event, even though I probably should have been. They were so amazed that I accepted the responsibility from the start. My supervisor even suggested that one of my supervisors should have been responsible but I would not allow it. I strongly stated that I was the one responsible for not taking action, and I was.

Now this was a severe situation, but certainly not the only one I ever faced. Now I can't promise that a person will never be fired or disciplined for accepting responsibility for something that has gone wrong, but it is the right thing to do. True Leaders don't make excuses and will fall on their sword when it is their responsibility.

Thank you!

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