What are the excuses you use to avoid examining the difference between where you are and where you'd love to be? You either have results or excuses, and they're mutually exclusive. If you take responsibility for your life and ask quality questions about how to fulfill it, you become a magnet for opportunities. Join Dr John Demartini and learn how you can start on a trajectory towards something truly meaningful and inspiring to you which will get you the results you'd love.

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But what you see out there is not what's out there.

It's your perceptions of what's out there,

and your decisions and the way you act is according to those perceptions.

I'd like to go down the avenue for the idea for people that come up with

excuses, why they don't do things.

So if you got something to write with and write on, that would be fantastic.

First of all,

there's no way I can do justice to this topic without also discussing what I

usually talk about, the very foundation of human drive and that's human values.

So if you have heard a few of my presentations,

you know I keep referring back to that.

Every human being lives moment by moment,

with a set of priorities, a set of values,

things that are most important to least important in their life.

This set of values determines how they perceive, decide and act in life.

Whatever's highest on that list of values, highest in priority,

the thing that's truly most important, most meaningful, most inspiring,

most fulfilling in their life, they spontaneously,

intrinsically are driven to fulfill it.

And they see whatever happens along the way as feedback

and on the way instead of in the way and failure.

But as you go down the list of values, in the hierarchy values,

you tend to procrastinate, hesitate, and frustrate in taking action.

You need external motivation to get you to do it.

Extrinsic motivation is a symptom, never a solution for human performance.

One of my highest values is teaching. Nobody has to motivate me to teach.

But one of my lower values is cooking or driving,

and you'd have to motivate me to do those things.

I've delegated those things and I don't do those things. I would delegate those.

So anytime I set a goal or an objective that is

congruent and align with what I value most,

I have a very high probability of being disciplined, reliable,

and focused on achieving it.

And I'm more likely be functioning from my executive

center, where I'm objective, where I'm more neutral,

where I'm more resilient and adaptable to change,

and will respond with whatever happens as a feedback mechanism to get me

where I want to go. And so I'll just keep working. I'll keep acting on it.

I'll build momentum towards the objective.

But the farther you go down that list of values,

the more unfulfilling life becomes.

Can you imagine if you had to do low priority things all day long and put out

fires and things you didn't wanna do, you would feel like frustrated, and again,

you'd hesitate, you wouldn't want to do it.

You'd feel a force from the external world.

And people would have to motivate you to get to work.

When you're engaged in what you're doing at work, you don't need to be reminded,

you're engaged, but if you're not, then you keep having to motivate you,

keep having to remind you to do things. Now,

whenever you're doing lower priority things,

your blood glucose and oxygen goes into a lower part of the brain.

A more primitive part of the brain you might say. And this is like the amygdala,

and the amygdala is the desire center, not the executive center.

And the desire center has a tendency to be in survival, not thrival.

The executive center is the thrival center. You thrive and you achieve,

and you gain competence and mastery and you end up in leader positions.

But the second you're doing something low on your priorities,

lower on your values, and you're unfulfilled doing 'em,

not inspiring to you, like me cooking or something, your

amygdala comes online as a survival response,

and it wants to avoid the thing that's unfulfilling and seeks some escape.

Escape. As a result of that escape,

we've kind of perceived that which we don't want to do

that's challenging as pain and the thing we fantasize about doing

is pleasure. And we disassociate from that which is painful to pleasure.

When we're in our executive center,

we embrace pain and pleasure in the pursuit of our purpose.

Like if we really want to keep fit,

we willing to go out and work out and even though the muscles are sometimes

sore, we just do it cuz we wanna get the fitness.

So we're embracing the pain and pleasure in the pursuit of it.

But when we're in our amygdala it's not inspiring to us,

we don't wanna do all that. As a result of it,

we wanna avoid the pain and seek the pleasure, avoid the predator,

seek the prey, in our brain. It's a primitive response.

When we're in that state, we tend not to want to act,

we'll procrastinate, hesitate, frustrate.

And then we are more vulnerable to excuses.

And what we do is we typically blame the things on the outside that we don't

want to do.

And these are circumstances that we now are wanting to give our self-blame to.

And we also look for outside things to give credit to.

Anytime we blame things on the outside,

we tend to look for crediting on the outside also.

So if we blame a devil,

we're gonna look for some sort of angel or savior to take care of us.

If we blame the external circumstances, COVID for the way we experience,

we're gonna basically look for something to save us,

the government or some outside force to save us.

When you're living your executive center,

you're more likely to realize reflective awareness,

that what you see out there is not what's out there,

it's your perceptions of what's out there,

and your decisions and the way you act is according to those perceptions.

So if you're giving excuses and you say, well, that did that out there,

that's the reason why I'm not doing what I'm doing,

you're not gonna empower yourself.

You're not gonna achieve what you really would love in life. In fact,

you may be actually getting feedback from the universe to let you know that what

you're pursuing isn't really, really what's important to you.

Most cases when people are in that mode of giving excuse,

they're usually pursuing something that's not deeply, deeply meaningful to 'em.

They think it is. They think it should be.

And many times when I'm actually interacting with clients that come up with

excuses, they blaming outside circumstances.

They usually are doing something that's low on their values and they're usually

sitting there not engaged.

I'd like to share a story of a gentleman that I worked with many years ago in

Australia, Melbourne, Australia.

I was asked to consult with a gentleman who had a forestry company,

a paper company., And his executive team,

he had four executive members who met with me first and said, you know,

our leader, our founder is 63 years old,

he's ready to retire and he's coasting and he's starting to fade and he's not

really leading and he's not being assertive and he's not really engaged,

and we either want to take the company over or get him fired up again,

but he's lost it, he's kind of fading out.

And they gave me the history of this thing, the history of his decaying focus.

And so I met with this leader and they all sat in the room when I was doing it

and I asked him a simple question.

What do you think is the reason why your company's lost market share and it's

gone down? Just, I'd love to hear what you have to say. And he said, well,

the Japanese has come in and we can't compete with the prices and this is

occurring and that's occurring.

And he gave me like 15 excuses of why his company's not doing well.

And then I said, all right, now that the BS is over.

Now that you are blaming things on the outside and looking for something on the

outside to solve it. (Pardon me, hit my computer here.)

Now let's get to the truth. And I asked him a simple question.

What is it that inspired you to build this company in the first place?

And suddenly he leans back and he goes, whoa.

And he told a story. He said, wow,

many, many years ago when I was a young boy,

there was a segregation between the rich and the poor and between the dark and

the light,

and they started to desegregate that and I ended up being from a poor area,

got bust into a very rich area and had to go to school with rich kids,

and when I went to school the very first day,

they all had nice tennis shoes and nice shirts and nice clothes and nice,

you know, notebooks and pens and paper and satchels and things,

and I didn't, and I was,

I had beat up all shoes and old clothes and I didn't have paper and pen and all

that. And so I got to school, I was felt humiliated.

I was riding on the bus. I felt humiliated.

I felt I was comparing myself to them. And so at the end of the day,

I didn't decide to go home on that bus. That was too embarrassing.

So I was gonna walk rather than go through that. But before I did,

I decided to walk around the classes and down the hallways and look in the

trashcan to see if I could find some paper, pens and pencils.

And so I collected whatever I could from the day, I went home,

walked home and I took all the paper and I laid it out there and I kind of

ironed it with this weight and heated it up and moistened it.

And then what I did is I trimmed it and I put blue on it and I made my own pad

of paper and I sharpened the pencils and I made the pencils ready so I could go

to school where I wouldn't feel so humiliated. I washed my shoes.

I washed my clothes. My mom helped me with washing clothes.

I washed my own shoes.

So I wasn't so distinctly different from these kids because it was humiliating.

Anyway, I decided I was gonna open a paper company.

And I said, so what was the real reason? He said,

because I didn't want kids to go through that.

I wanted to make sure that every kid could afford a pad of paper and have a

pencil. Now, when he did, he got kind of teary eyed, like I am,

and the executives got kind of teary eyed. And I said to him a simple thing.

So what you're really saying is, you got so successful,

you got so busy that you lost the very purpose,

the reason for being here, you forgot it, you forgot the kids.

And he looked at me for moment, he goes, I did forget to kids.

Wow. I said, are you really, really, are you planning on retiring?

Because as long as you're green, you're growing, as soon as you're ripen,

you rot, if you don't have a reason to live, you have a reason to die.

And there's nothing wrong with retirement,

as long as it doesn't get in the way of your mission in life.

If you don't have a mission in life, you're probably gonna end up fading.

He says, that's interesting you say that I've been almost scared to get,

you know, retired. I'm afraid what's gonna be,

I'm afraid I'm gonna lose my faculty, I'm not gonna challenge myself.

I don't really have a lot extra to do, maybe for a while,

but I don't know for long term, my wife's even anxious about it.

And I'm having anxiety about being around it. I said,

I guarantee your wife is gonna like you being home temporarily,

but after a while, you're probably used to telling people what to do,

you'll probably try to do it with her and you'll get probably retaliations.

I said, you sure you wanna retire? You need to kind of make a decision.

Because if you're sitting on the fence, your business is on the fence.

He made a decision there and,

that he's gonna go talk to his wife and make a decision to go whether he is

gonna fire himself up or fire himself out.

He decided to get back into the business. Yes, he was gonna delegate more.

Yes. He was gonna do a little less hours, a little bit more time for his wife,

but he was actually in fear about it.

And he was sitting in trepidation and he was sitting there sidetracked.

And he wasn't focused on his customers and he forgot his mission,

and he came up with all theses excuses about why he wasn't achieving what he was

in life and why his company was down.

Once he made that decision,

once he came back on board and once he got inspired again,

he reclaimed in three months market share for Australia,

within six months market share back. He was back in the game.

It had nothing to do with the world on the outside.

It has everything to do with your perception, decisions,

and actions on the inside. When you're living by your highest values,

you're resilient, adaptable and focused. You're disciplined, reliable,

focused, and you see things, whatever happens,

on the way towards your objective and you use it resiliently and you create

responses to it in such a way that you get your outcome.

But if you're not engaged in it, you're gonna come up with excuses.

You're gonna blame things. Anytime you blame outside circumstances,

anytime you give credit to outside circumstances,

you gave yourself the power to make the world decide your outcome.

And you're a victim of history, not a master of destiny.

So if you wanna live in that format, that's the way to do it.

Become disengaged. That's what was happening with the gentleman,

lost sight of his mission.

Your highest value is where your mission is derived from.

That's your purpose in life,

your ontological identity revolves around what you value most,

your teleological purpose revolves what's really highest in your value.

And your epistemological knowledge, what you're most knowledgeable about,

where you excel and lead is in that area.

But he got sidetracked and started thinking about doing

not inspiring to him. And he lost his vision. And those without a vision perish,

those with a vision flourish. Well he regained his vision,

remembered the kids, recited his own story again to himself,

and got back onto priority.

When you live by your highest priorities,

you're less likely to give excuses and give blame from the outside world and

look for something on the outside world to save you.

Jim Collins in one of his books,

Good to Great talked very simply about many people are looking for the magic

bullet to save their business, or save their life.

But in the process of doing that, that's not the answer.

There's no magic bullet on the outside that's gonna rescue or save you.

There's no savior out there that's gonna save you. It's your accountability.

The villain out there is not the villain and the hero out there is not the hero,

it's you. I've been teaching the Breakthrough Experience,

which is my signature program for many, many years, and this program,

what I do is I ask people, you know,

to take something that they resent about somebody or infatuate about somebody,

and identify where and when they display that in their own life,

and I've yet to see a trait, not one,

that can't be owned 100% to the same degree as you see in other people.

I also ask them to go,

so whatever this thing is you think is terrible that these people have done that

you think is a villain, what's the benefit to 'em?

And I stack up the advantages until the advantages are equal to the

disadvantages. And all of a sudden,

they're no longer a victim of that outside world.

They realize that they have the ability to change their perception, decision,

action. William James, father of modern psychology,

said the greatest discovery of his generation is that human beings can alter

their lives by altering their perceptions and attitudes of mind.

The second you ask the quality question,

which I explain in the Breakthrough Experience, in my Demartini Method,

the second you ask a quality question,

where do I do the same thing to the same degree, quantitatively ,qualitatively,

what's the advantage to it and the benefits to it, the

And I get the benefits equaling the drawbacks,

I'm no longer a victim of that misperception,

that subjective bias that makes me wanna avoid and search for

something else. It allows me to be present and pursue

what's really meaningful to me.

And I don't go and look for something on the outside to rescue me from the

outside. Cuz when you blame something, you look for something to give credit to,

and you dissociate from your own accountability.

And that's exactly what that gentleman was doing because he lost sight of his

mission in the company. And that's what a lot of people do.

And they don't feel that they know their mission.

That's why in the Breakthrough Experience,

that's so important for us to stop and reflect and look at what we really value

and start to structure and design what it is that's really meaningful and

purposeful to us.

Cause if you don't fill your day with inspiring things that are meaningful,

your day fills up with things that don't inspire you and are not meaningful and

are distractions and disorders. And a lot of our symptomatology in our body,

in our psyche, are feedback mechanisms to get us back to what is true to us,

what's authentic, what's meaningful.

So excuses are signs we're not doing what's really priority.

We're not really giving ourselves permission to go

selves.

We're subordinating to outer authorities and minimizing ourselves and feeling

unfulfilled and self-depreciating and looking for outside things to rescue us,

looking for immediate gratification to compensate,

thinking that what we buy in a store or what we eat in our body is gonna fulfill

what's not fulfilled in our life. And then we basically blame, well,

they put that food in front of me. I watched somebody recently,

They put that food in front of me, they're the cause of why I overate,

I can't let some starving child in another country, which is an excuse,

why I overate. There are unconscious motives.

Anytime we infatuate with somebody we're unconscious of the downsides,

anything we resent, we're unconscious of the upsides.

So anytime we're not doing what's highest in priority and down in our amygdala,

going into avoiding pain and seeking pleasure,

we're in subjective biases and we take our full mindfulness and consciousness

and divide it into conscious and unconscious halves.

And the unconscious halves are the unconscious motives that's trying to

intuitively be fulfilled in our life to get us back to authenticity and

mindfulness. And so we have these unconscious motives

but we blame external circumstances and excuses out there why we are not

fulfilled in life.

Instead of just being accountable for taking actions that are really important

to us that are prioritized.

Why would you expect to have a fulfilled life if you're not filling your life

full with what's most meaningful to you and most priority to you and deciding

what it is? If you're not living by design, you're gonna live by duty.

You're gonna live by everything else that everybody's expecting from you.

You're gonna brain offload your decisions to other people and subordinate to all

their expectations. And then wonder why you're not fulfilled.

Living by highest priorities is one of the most significant things we can do if

we want to live beyond excuse world,

because that's where we're not going to procrastinate, hesitate, frustrate.

That's where we're gonna actually take actions that are inspired.

That's where we're gonna have the most achievements and fulfillment,

most leadership skills.

The less likely we're gonna subordinate to other people outside that we envy,

we're not gonna envy and imitate people, which is suicide to us,

living in the shadows of others and trying to be somebody we're not.

Why be second at being somebody else when you can be first at being you?

We're gonna live by what our ontological identity revolves around,

which is our highest value, which is where we spontaneously act.

I delegate everything in my life that's not most inspiring,

that way I have an inspiring life. It's not rocket science.

It's simply taking the time to do it. Well, if you come up with excuses,

well that's fine. People say to me,

well you have money that's why you could do that. No,

I became wealthy because I did that.

I became inspired even more because I did that.

Not as a result of me doing something else first.

I found that that was one of the most significant things I could do,

is to free myself up to do what is most meaningful,

that serves the greatest number of people to earn the greatest income,

to be able to delegate the most things.

So I'm free to go on and do what is most inspiring.

So I don't live a life of excuse and regret. At the end of your life

you're gonna be asking yourself a very simple question.

Did you do everything you could with everything you were given?

If you can say yes, great, you fulfilled your life. But if not,

you come up with excuses, your own BS meter's gonna go off as you get older,

cuz you know they're bull, they're not true.

They're signs of not living by what's priority to you.

I cannot tell you how significant that is, by living by priority in life,

which is why I take the time to go through the Value Determination process in

the Breakthrough Experience and educate you about that whole system and how and

why it works,

and make sure you go through and clarify what you feel is your mission and then

show you how to dissolve the baggage that distracts you that you come up with

that are the excuses. The excuses,

anything you infatuate with

and you inject the values of people you put upon pedestals,

you're gonna end up without even consciously knowing it,

you're gonna be end up trying to live in their values.

And then you're gonna end up procrastinating hesitating

you. And then you're gonna come up with excuses, well,

I had to do that for them or I had to do it because what would people think or

what would, I wouldn't be a good mother,

according to somebody else's value system.

You never make a mistake in your own values.

You only make a mistake when you compare your actions to somebody else's values.

It's the same as you only think other people make a mistake if you compare their

actions to yours. They don't make mistakes. You don't make mistakes, really,

in your own value system.

So what happens is excuses are a byproduct of not living by priority.

And that's why again,

in the Breakthrough I'm making sure that people are dissolving the emotional

baggage which is distracting 'em that they regret,

so you don't have to carry around baggage.

Start to live by priorities so you're not subordinating to all these people on

the outside, living as a sheep instead of a shepherd. You wanna be the shepherd?

You wanna be the unborrowed, visionary, not the borrowed visionary.

Because you borrowing a vision from others,

it's not gonna be an inspiring life and I guarantee you're not gonna empower

your life and any area of your life you're not empowered,

people are gonna overpower you and you're gonna end up holding yourself back in

life. If you wanna go where you really want to go,

it needs to be defined really clearly,

it needs to be congruent with what you value,

you need to actually sit out and be certain

it's in congruence because the second you do the blood glucose and oxygen goes

in the forebrain and activates the executive center where strategic planning

comes in and you see it in your mind's eye, you see how you can do it,

you execute the plan,

you self-govern from this area of the brain and you end up mastering your life.

And you don't give up with excuses, cuz there's no reason for excuses,

because you are realizing that you're a master of your fate,

captain of your ship, and you determine your destiny and you can live by design,

not duty.

And therefore there's no need for excuses because there's nothing in your way

because you've learned to see that no matter what happens, it serves you.

In the Breakthrough Experience when I have you go through the Demartini Method

and I have you take this challenging situation,

find out how it serves you and train you to get beyond your comfort zone,

you realize, wow, it had nothing to do with what was out there.

It was my perception. And I ask a new set of questions, I change my perception,

I change my decision, I change my action, and there was no excuse left,

no need for an excuse. There was simply an action,

a very spontaneous inspired and fulfilling and practical and productive action.

And if you fill your day with high priority actions,

it doesn't fill up with low priority distractions.

You fill up your day with high productivity,

it doesn't fill up with unproductivity and you don't come up with reasons.

But blaming hasn't done, you know, Epictetus, the Greek philosopher,

many centuries ago said, when we start out on our journey, we blame others,

when we go further in our journey, we blame ourselves,

when we finally master our life, there's nothing to blame.

We realize there was no moral issue there to blame. No,

as long as we're living in our amygdala,

which is the seat of all the immoral hypocrisies,

goods and bads and rights and wrongs,

we finally get beyond that and realize we live where things are neither one of

those or the other, neither positive or negative, neither good nor evil, just,

it's an inspired action.

Now you've gotten beyond the world of excuses and the world of blaming and

giving credits to people.

You can be grateful for people for achieving something that's meaningful,

but exaggerating and giving false attribution bias on credit or false

attribution bias on blame, is never gonna get you mastery.

So we do that, I see this since COVID has come around, I've seen tons of this.

I've seen people blame this and blame that and blame this and blame the

government, the government blaming people. I mean,

the conspiracies are everywhere because people are not empowered and not doing

what they really inspired to do.

And it ain't because of it's something outside there. You know,

there's some people out there and did extraordinary things during this time.

And if somebody can do extraordinary things, so can you.

It's not out there stopping us. It's what we decide to do in our perception,

decisions and actions.

And that's what we can do if we all of a sudden take the time to prioritize our

life. That's why I basically tell people and on my website, dr.demartini.com,

I talk about go to the value determination process,

fill out the form and get clear. It's private,

no one has to know anything about it, except you,

but go in there and find out what it is that's really, truly meaningful.

What your life really demonstrates.

What do you really fill your space and time with?

What do you really are disciplined to do.

So you can start to structure your life with your command before other people do

it. Cuz if you don't empower your life, everybody's gonna empower over you.

Nobody's gonna get up in the morning and dedicate their life to your fulfillment

except you. And if you don't do it, nobody's doing it.

And people that are clear on what they do and they set real congruent goals that

have real meaning, they get it done. I'm amazed how many people think,

'well you wanna make God laugh,

tell 'em your goals.' Those are people that are setting fantasies,

setting things that are incongruent,

setting things that they think they should and ought to, supposed to,

got to do according to society's expectations instead of what's deeply

meaningful to them. So if you wanna live beyond the excuse world,

it's time to prioritize your life.

That's why I want people to come to the Breakthrough Experience,

to help them empower their life so they don't sit there and come up with excuses

why they're not doing what they love.

There's no reason why you can't love what you do and do what you love on a daily

basis. So anyway,

I gave you something on excuses to help you on this journey,

also wanna mention something here, free on demand masterclass,

Access Your Seven Greatest Powers,

because this program is about how to empower all seven areas of your life,

so you have a reduction in a need for the so-called excuse world.

So you're not sitting there giving credits and blames and dissociating and

thinking the world outside you is doing it. You're appreciating yourself,

the events and the people that help you fulfill what's meaningful to you.

Living with appreciation and love for your life is different than credit and

blame games. Cause that's a moral hypocrisy that you're gonna be trapped in,

but giving yourself permission to do something extraordinary is what I'm

interested in. So thank you for listening today.

Please come and join me on the weekly webinars that I do.

And also please take advantage of this masterclass,

the masterclass I guarantee if you listen to it a three or four times, you're

gonna say thank you,

cuz it's practical information you can put into action right away to help you

empower those areas,

so you're not having people run your life and you're not having to come up with

excuses why you're not fulfilled. So anyway, enjoy your week.

Thank you for listening to me.

Take advantage of the masterclass and I'll see you next week at our next