ON PERSONAL GROWTH || The 5 Most Common Excuses that Hinder Your Career
You are the sum of your excuses.
You are where you are and who you are in your career because of the conscious choices you made. While you may think that you’ve just been down on your luck and the world is scheming against you, more often than not, it’s the excuses you give yourself to opt out of being successful. Yes, that’s right. You opted out of becoming a success.
Here are the 5 most common excuses I hear in the workplace that sets back even the most brilliant individuals.
1 - I don’t know how
When you were born, you didn’t know how to walk. You also didn’t know how to ride a bike before you got on one. Neither did you know how to swim before you took swimming lessons. Drawing? Well, first, you had to pick up a pen, didn’t you? We ALL didn’t know how, but somehow we all figured it out, didn’t we? If we didn’t, we’d still be like toddlers eating liquid foods. This is the top of the list and the worst excuse not to try new things or pick up new skills in your role.
We get that right now, at this moment, you really don’t know how to accomplish the task, but could you learn it? If others have acquired the same skill, then what is it about you that makes it impossible?
2 - I can’t do it
Your boss asks you to assume a bigger role, but you instantly experience the fear of failure and turn down the new role. “I just can’t do it,” you say. This is followed by “I don’t have the experience” or “I don’t know how to do it.” You set your boundaries, and as they say, whether you believe you can or believe you can’t — you’re right.
What’s the worse that could happen if you tried it out and it wasn’t a fit? Maybe you could pre-empt the transition to the new role with a discussion with your boss to revert to your existing role if things didn’t work out. When I am confronted with something that demands more from me than my current skill set, I think of the worst-case situation and then decide whether I could live with that; if I can, I’ll go forward. What’s your worst-case scenario, and is it really THAT bad?
What’s holding you back from taking a step forward in your career?
3 - Someone else is already doing it
This should give you all the more reason to do it! There are other people freelancing as consultants, does that mean you can’t be a consultant? There are many established bakeries in your town, but does this mean you can’t be a home baker with a niche selling wedding cakes? There are other people flying planes, guess no one else can be a pilot now. Why do we shy away from answering our calling just because another person or company is pursuing the same idea? Every person is different, and because of this, each person's services and products could be unique in their own way — it’s got the company’s culture and the founder’s character traits deeply engrained into it.
There are plenty of differentiators to choose from, and you don’t even have to look that hard.
4 - I don’t have the resources to do it
This is usually referring to monetary resources. Sometimes, it may be an entrepreneur struggling to realize all their ideas. Let’s tackle these two scenarios separately.
Don’t have the money to rent a storefront to sell your designs? You can happily design at home, in your garage, in your room, in your mom’s basement, and set up a website with a few clicks. Selling products? Snap photos on your phone and set up an online gallery. Selling services? Pick from hundreds of website templates and customize them with your words and sell yourself.
5- Nobody wants to help me
Would you consider yourself busy on most days? So are other people! If you send one email and don’t hear back, maybe it’s time to take a page from experience salespeople and try, try again. The person you’re trying to reach and ask a favour from may very well be busy; they saw your email and, unfortunately, never found the time to respond. By the time they remembered, they could no longer locate your email from 10 days ago. Now, if your follow-up email makes a timely appearance, this increases your chances of hearing back.
People tell me they get it and know they should follow up, but after a few times, they give up. The rationale is that the person MUST have seen it by now, and if they still haven’t gotten back, they just don’t want to talk. People communicate in different ways, some might prefer to pick up calls rather than check their emails. I still know a few rare characters who don’t have a phone!
If that ONE person doesn’t respond, there are many other options; all roads lead to Rome. Just because one person turns you away doesn’t mean others will do the same. People in my network who are willing to help greatly outnumber the ones who don’t.
Successful people are persistent, they don’t ever believe they’ve hit ‘the end of the road’; they just think they must have taken a wrong turn and then backtrack to try another approach. They are persistent, and in the end, they are the ones reaping the big rewards.
Do any of these excuses sound familiar to you? If it does, it’s time to erase them from your vocabulary. Onward and upward!
