Make one excuse… and pretty soon, you’ll make another.

Photo by Kai Sou, used under Creative Commons licence.

“I’ve got too much on my plate right now …”

“I’m having family problems…”

“I just need to wait until…”

We’ve all got so many excuses for not doing the things that we know we really ought to do.

But here’s the truth. Excuses are like arseholes – we’ve all got them… and they all stink!

This is the problem with excuses: once you made one… you’ll soon find a way to make another. You meant to go to the gym on a Monday night and for two weeks, you did. Then the next Monday – it was raining. So you stayed and home and you swore you’d go next week and work out twice as hard. Now it’s Sunday again and the weather forecast doesn’t look so good…

You’ve already made one excuse. That makes it easier to just make another. Before very long, you’re not going to the gym on a Monday any more.

This is the opposite of taking responsibility, stepping up and holding yourself to account.  Excuses lead to inertia, not to purposeful action.

At Panther, we teach positive self-discipline right from the start

At Panther Taekwondo Black Belt Academy, we instil the mentality of ‘no excuses!’ into our students from the very start. 95% training attendance is required – that means no small excuses are acceptable. We tell them: if your leg drops off on the way to training, hop along until you make it and you’ll still be in the team! 

Team members having a tough time can swap phone numbers and ring each other for support. That builds positive peer pressure.  No-one is alone – and everyone steps up. So there’s support from within the group as well as from leaders.

In all sorts of ways, from the very beginning when our students are young, we want them to become people who take full responsibility for their actions and expect high personal standards. Because if you don’t expect high standards from yourself, you won’t be able to expect it from others. And your self-discipline will impact positively on every aspect of your life. .