Week 4 is about Explaining! This is the final week of “Ex Energy”. Your Exceptions, Excuses, Extensions and Explanations bring you emergencies, hurt your money & relationships and lower your self-love.

I’m going to challenge you to act on all you’ve learned this month about Ex- Energy, but first, let’s spend time with the grand daddy of them all. Explaining.

Catch up on your Ex-Energy Series!

Do you want:

Respect or Exceptions? 

Trust or Excuses? 

Confidence or Extensions?

Explanations Cheat Consequences

What You are Doing: You give your result and then you launch into explanations. You are either casting doubt on your best or didn’t do your best and are seeking a backdoor out of your consequences.

Note: Explanations are the MOST insidious of the 4 Ex-Energies because they always accompany requests for Extensions & Exceptions and justify our Excuses.

Harm It Causes: Criticizing.

Explanations cause ALL the Ex-Energy harms at once. Feeling the need to give them or receiving them damages TRUST, destroys RESPECT and kills CONFIDENCE. Where you are seen as untrustworthy, unrespectable and weak – you are powerless, BLAMED and micromanaged.

What It Attracts Energetically: Weak & Critical People.

If you are giving the explanations, you attract critical people. If you are accepting them, you draw weak people. People who always have a “story”.

Back when I ran my law firm, we called these the “what-had-happened-was” folks. You do not like these people and cringe when you know you have to rely on them for anything.  And if this is you? You subconsciously self-loathe YOURSELF (not the behavior). You will always have a story instead of your result.

What You Get When You Stop: Power. A feeling that you can control your surroundings and yourself. We give explanations to avoid consequences primarily out of fear of responsibility. Restore responsibility, you get control and power.

You may also be in the habit of unnecessary, nervous explaining. Notice and reduce it. You’ll feel stronger & happier.

Explaining Makes Us Unhappy

Have you noticed that in general you do NOT feel happy when you have to give an explanation? There is a automatic sense of shame or less-than-ness attached to it. They don’t play well together.

Where does that come from? Good efforts and results don’t NEED explanations and bad efforts and results are rarely saved by them.

Remember Lucille Ball? “Luuuuccccy, you have some ‘splaining to do!!!” And cue the sheepish look on her face as she tried to get out of something SHE DID.

An Advantage to NOT Explaining

I had an Alpha, N, who was often late. One simple rule helped her improve that greatly. I told her she was not allowed to EXPLAIN why she was late to the people she inconvenienced.  That helped her shift her behavior.

The ability to give an explanation had made being late ok. Once she couldn’t give one, she felt terrible for being late and nipped it in the bud. (Love you N!)

When I was married, I endured years of my ex-husband’s repeated apologies for the exact same things. I finally told him he had to stop apologizing.Why?  Because the ability to APOLOGIZE cleaned everything up well enough. He was left with insufficient pain to motivate him to change his behavior.

Happiness is NOT having to explain anything. Sometimes that is because you are in charge but even better if it is because your good results don’t NEED defending.

>> 72 Hr. No Ex-Energy Challenge<<<

I invite you to take the 72 hour NO EX-ENERGY challenge.

No Exceptions, No Extensions, No Excuses

and No Explaining for 72 hours.

This will be hard for many of you.

Change your performance or choices so you do not NEED to explain your results. Note, I am not telling you to refuse to explain poor performance. I am suggesting that if you COULDN’T “explain it away” you would be motivated to do better the first time around.

On the flip side, some of you are not explaining poor performance, you are explaining to compensate for poor self-confidence.  Your explanations given for good results, make people look at your good work AS IF it is POOR.

Train yourself to notice if you are a nervous explainer. You are inviting unnecessary criticism of yourself. You get what you offer & what you fear.

When you stop looking at what could go wrong, others will also. In that new, healthier space, you can lean back, breathe and feel happier.

72 hours. Can you do it? Tell me your results. I want stories!!

In Joy,

P.S. The Alpha Schools are almost here! Check us out!