Today we have another heart felt blog from my favorite intern and coach in training Daniel Larabie! Without anymore fanfare here is how Dan feels about Excuses and how it affects love and dating.

Thanks David for letting me post another blog that really resonates with me. I hope all of enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed writing it.

We all have our go to excuses: for some it’s “I’m not good looking enough”, others it’s “I’ve been hurt before and now I’m just out for revenge.” For me it was always very simple:
“There’s something wrong with me.”

I didn’t know what was wrong with me. But I knew something was. Id’ been dumped, cheated on, and couldn’t find a job that I didn’t hate. Not only that, it seemed like the women who dumped me and cheated on me ended up in more emotional pain than I was in. I was so rotten that even the act of getting rid of me hurt people. It seemed to me that the more someone got to know me the worse I became. And I could twist anything into making about why something was wrong with me.

If I met an attractive girl I’d tell myself that I wasn’t nearly good looking enough to talk to her. If she turned out to be smart she was way too smart to put up with me and if she was funny, I wasn’t nearly funny enough to be with her. I was NEVER good enough because there was something wrong with me.

Even when things were going well I always had it in the back of my mind… there’s something wrong with me and something bad is going to happen. Something I just didn’t see coming. It’s going to hurt and I’m going to feel like an idiot because I didn’t see it coming.

These excuses…they were my story. I was the tragic hero, fighting against the sad reality of my situation… that I could never be good enough for happiness… but I was sure as hell going to fight for happiness until I had breathed my last.

I’ll tell you all a deep dark secret… I liked my excuses, my story, my tragic heroism. It was romantic. It made me feel… special. It made me feel like I was unique. I wasn’t one of the shiny happy people but I also wasn’t one of those guys who had just given up and wrote sad poetry to try and impress girls. I had a quiet courage in the face of certain death. I was a Spartan at Thermopylae or a soldier at the Alamo. I embraced my excuses because the more excuses I had, the more epic my struggle became.

Except, as much as I loved this story I had made myself the hero of… I didn’t love myself. My life seemed to be going nowhere. I had nothing. One day, it dawned on me that if I wanted to love myself and my life I’d have to get rid of my most beloved possession: My excuses. I had to drop the story I’d written for myself and honestly look at who I was. It was terrifying and I hated what I found. I was a miserable person. I wanted so bad to still be the doomed hero. I was safe there. But I refused to go back. I discovered that when you get rid of excuses you can create whatever life you want for yourself. You can be the REAL hero in your own story and save yourself.

So, if you have excuses, and we all do, drop them. Take a hard look at yourself and do all the hard work that needs to be done in order to be the person you want to be.