Excuses

Do you make excuses? For what?

Missing the anniversary? Late home from work? Your funk of a mood (she started it!)?

Well the problem with excuses is that they mean nothing and make no difference whatsoever. I catch my 11 year old son doing something that I need to correct and the first thing out of his mouth is an excuse. Actually, from his perspective it is his rationale for why it was the right and logical thing to be doing. So we could call excuses your rationale, and ask instead, "do you have a rationale for everything?"

Somewhere in this society, courtesy of someone (I'll blame a litigious bunch of lawyers with too much time and not enough cases), we got this strange idea that an excuse - a really good excuse - makes a difference. "See, what you have to understand is that blah blah..." No I do not have to understand. No results and a good story still equals no results. Late for dinner and a good reason is still late for dinner.

Wayne Levine, author of Hold On To Your N.U.T.s, calls it the voice of your little boy and says that as men we need to "silence the little boy." I could not agree more. When it comes to being in relationship, stories, rationale, good intentions and excuses just don't cut it. In truth they all kill relationship. Not cleanly like a slit throat, they kill relationships like a bad case of gangrene; smelling and rotting and poisoning the body until it can no longer function.

One of the best disciplines you can adopt to be successful in marriage is the elimination of excuses. Practice with your men's circle or team. Build a no tolerance, no excuse environment. Start and end on time, make hard and big commitments to each other and take a good look at what happens when there is zero tolerance for excuses. Not done is not done but you can see what happened more clearly. Now you are cooking!