OPINION: Do you always have to explain yourself?

I recently watched a TED talk by Amy Morin on mental strength, and it immediately became my favourite.

I was quite intrigued by one of the things she said; that as free adults, there are very few things in life that we HAVE to do.

And today I want to relate this to the regular and often detrimental habit of explaining ourselves. How often do you feel the need to explain yourself? Do you find it necessary? Does it solve any problem or does it merely make you feel better? Well, the fact is that in most cases you don’t really have to explain yourself because it does more harm than good. You are also risking being one of those people who are considered full of excuses and uncommitted.

I observed a particular incident last week that closely relates to this idea. A woman was walking in my neighbourhood followed by a crying little girl, about 5 years old. The crying child got the attention of all of us around.

Some of us threw some verbal and non-verbal gestures to the lady, in futile efforts to tell her that it would have been nice if she did something to make the girl stop crying.

One guy finally pleaded with her loudly – “please make her stop crying”. At this point then she decided to explain to us WHY the girl was crying, and WHY despite being her mother, she WASN’T GOING TO make her stop crying. She paused walking, rested both her hands on her waist, shaking her legs inside her bright orange, long dera; then said, “I carried her bag to school this morning, and now she wants me to carry it again back home. I am tired. As much as I am expected to fulfil my duties as a parent, I am not doing to do this one”. The small audience was clearly unimpressed by her response.

I wondered why the lady felt the need to explain herself to us. Did she feel that we understood or may be agreed with her? If we did, would it make her feel better?

Let us just pause one moment and contemplate this question. Why do you often feel the need to explain your actions or inactions to others? Why?

In another example, despite having two weeks ahead of a marathon, a friend of mine said he couldn’t go for the marathon because he didn’t have enough time to prepare and if he prepared for only two weeks his body would be very sore.

You see, we must be able to separate I CANNOT(s) from I WILL NOT(s). Most often we don’t do things not because we cannot do them, but because we will not do them.

It is really the will in action here and not the capability. And quite often, whenever we fail to do things because we are not willing, we tend to use the I CANNOT to justify our lack of willpower.

The need to explain ourselves is often driven by the need to feel understood and supported. What we fail to understand is that NOT WANTING or NOT PLANNING to do something is a self-sufficient sentence, most often not needing to be explained or justified.

Justification only calms our guilty consciousness which could be telling us some ugly truths that we don’t want to hear; I am being lazy, I am lacking motivation, I could do it if I really wanted to, I could do better - this kind of truth. However, we must know that this is the kind of truth we need the most; to hold us accountable and responsible. Wise men once said, “To human is to error”. It means that as humans, we will at times fail and we will be disappointed.

The key question however is, how do we react to our own underperformance? Do we use it for our next success, or to our own detriment?

In personal commitments and the workplace alike, the habit of justifying and explaining the self is stealing away credibility and undermining performance in many ways.

Maybe you were to start your master’s degree, maybe you were to read a book, maybe you were to cut down on time wasters such as social media, and TV, maybe you were to stop eating junk, maybe you were to start working out; and you did not.

Instead of justifying your inactions, find the real reasons, as to why you failed, address them and try again. Involve someone you trust if you are finding it hard to break a bad habit.

But just don’t fall in the detrimental habit of justifying everything you did or did not do; because the truth is, it will gradually kill your desire to try again and it’s the perfect recipe to becoming an expert procrastinator.