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Grace Vs Excuse {Episode 153}
324 Plays3 years ago
One of our favorite episodes of all time is back today to help you understand the difference between showing ourselves grace and making excuses for when we're feeling a bit lazy.
Motherhood can be a strange dichotomy of both utter exhaustion and total boredom and so it's important to understand when we need to push ourselves and when it's essential to give ourselves some rest. We'll walk you through how to navigate this tricky dilemma for both yourself and others.
Episode 52 Goalsetting for Moms
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode 67
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to episode 67 of Outnumbered the Podcast. Thanks for being here. Today we're going to talk about grace versus excuse. What exactly is grace and how to recognize when you're just making excuses. This is an episode that we are so excited to share with you. Thanks for tuning in.
00:00:27
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Outnumber the Podcast. I'm Bonnie. And I'm Audrey. We're experienced moms to a combined total of 18 children. Our mission is to help overwhelmed parents find peace in parenting and humor in the chaos. Come join us as we attempt uninterrupted conversation about parenting with joy and intention.
00:00:51
Speaker
Okay.
Humorous Anecdote: Bacon and Yogurt Mishap
00:00:52
Speaker
And before we start into today's episode on grace versus excuse and what exactly do we mean by that, we're going to start off with a little humor segment. So the other morning we were sitting down at breakfast and I was watching my two-year-old eat. Oh, I guess she's three now. I was watching my three-year-old eat and she picked up her bacon off her plate.
00:01:16
Speaker
and she took a bite and she made a little face and she picked up her spoon and she took a bite of blueberry yogurt and she sat there and kind of blinked her eyes and she picked up her bacon again and she crumbled her bacon all to pieces in her blueberry yogurt. And she picked up her spoon again, she picked up her spoon again and she took a bite of the blueberry yogurt and she said,
00:01:44
Speaker
I don't like it. Gee, I wonder why. So I said to her, well, you know what? You're the one that put the bacon in the yogurt, and so you need to eat it today. And she tried to tell me, she actually tried to tell me that her brother, her brother next to her in line, that she always blames everything on that he put the bacon in her yogurt.
00:02:14
Speaker
They learn oh so young to pass the fuck, don't they? He did it. Right, right. So if anyone out there is wondering, you know, maybe bacon and yogurt, no, nope, nope, take it on Audrey's three year old's authority. They don't go well together.
00:02:33
Speaker
I have had bacon and chocolate. That's an interesting combination. Have you had that? Yes. Oh, yes. I will not deny that I had a sprinkling of bacon on some sweet French toast at a fancy breakfast place. And that was delicious. I'm not knocking the sweet savory pairing. I just think probably not yogurt.
00:02:54
Speaker
Oh, so anyway, that little story, it's very funny and it tickled me all day that day that I watched her do that. But
Grace vs. Excuses: Understanding the Difference
00:03:01
Speaker
it is a good segue into our topic today, grace versus excuse. And so why did we decide to do this episode? I don't know why, but I think maybe Bonnie and I have both been sort of led to do this topic, this episode on this topic, because we've both been thinking about it for a while and decided that we should do an episode about it.
00:03:24
Speaker
So we say all the time, lower your expectations. We do say that all the time, but then we were thinking that there is a point when you can go too low with your expectations. So we were going to... First of all, I wanted to start out by reading a definition of grace. What exactly is grace? Because that can be a confusing word.
00:03:51
Speaker
So, dictionary.com says they have a couple different definitions, but I really liked one of them. It says it's elegance or beauty of form, manner, motion, or action. And then another definition that they give is favor or goodwill.
00:04:12
Speaker
So I like those two definitions and trying to keep them in mind as we go through this. What does it mean to have grace? And then what does it mean? I think everybody knows what it means to make an excuse, right? We all do that. We all know what that means.
00:04:31
Speaker
So we're actually going to split this episode into three different parts, but I think obviously the first thing that came to our mind was this having grace versus making excuses for our own selves and our own lives, right? Especially when we're talking about lowering our own expectations. If you guys are doing social distancing or isolation right now like the rest of us,
00:04:52
Speaker
then maybe you're understanding just what is too low of expectations for yourself. Like you're like, okay, it's been a week of TV and no learning anything and no getting out of our pajamas. Maybe it's time to step it up a little bit, right? We all know where.
00:05:08
Speaker
where our bare minimum is for sanity's sake. But there are other aspects of this topic that we want to talk about as well. One is teaching grace versus making excuses to our children. So that's kind of the very next step, right? When we can grasp a concept, then we want to teach it to our kids. And then finally, this concept applied to other people, those that we associate with family members, neighbors, strangers, etc.
00:05:34
Speaker
Yeah. So we were thinking about when do we allow ourselves grace and when are we just making excuses? So I think just an introduction to kind of this idea is that we need to have grace with ourselves at times and we need to recognize when we're making excuses and
00:05:58
Speaker
calling it grace, labeling it grace when we're just making an excuse. Have you ever done that? Yes, totally. And I think that there's definitely some beauty in recognizing that that's what we're doing.
Personal Stories: Excuses vs. Grace
00:06:10
Speaker
I fully understand that I've said, I'm going to cut out sugar for a while and then I say, well, I'm nursing so I need higher calories therefore I'm going to buy
00:06:18
Speaker
You know what I mean? That's an excuse. That's because I can't cut out sugar because I'm addicted, you know, versus having a terrible day and realizing I just need a square of chocolate to, you know, fix things. So we're going to talk about when, when it is really grace and when it is excuse, but really a lot of that is very personal.
00:06:34
Speaker
I would say that one way to define what your efforts are is by asking yourself if they are your best efforts. Now, I think some of us say, you know, I'm doing my best and expect that to look phenomenal every single day. But we all know that sometimes our best is
00:06:50
Speaker
rolling off the couch, right? Or getting out of bed that day. That's my best. Like when you're feeling sick, because you're pregnant, or you're super sleep deprived because you've had sick babies keeping you up all night. There are days when your best looks like one foot in front of the other. That's it, right? Barely feeding yourself and the kids. And we are not knocking that, like in those survival times, like we talk about, right?
00:07:13
Speaker
But sometimes our best effort can change very rapidly, like we'll be in a survival time and then all of a sudden everybody feels better and the next week our best looks way farther than what it was before. Does that make sense? Right? Only you and probably God will know if you are making excuses for this hard time in your life or you really are giving it all and it's time to just have that grace and peace with your effort.
00:07:38
Speaker
Right? Yes, that's so true. And so learning to discern between grace and making excuses and when it's appropriate to have grace with yourself and when it's appropriate to push forward. And so, like I was thinking of an example, today I was doing yoga and I was trying to do a side arm plank and my arm that was supporting me was shaking like a little leaf blown in the wind. It was not pretty.
00:08:08
Speaker
Well, excuse if in this situation, me trying to do a sidearm plank and shaking excuse would be laying down curling up in child's pose and saying, OK, I'm just not having a good day for yoga and I'm just not going to do not going to do this today. This isn't me today.
00:08:29
Speaker
Whereas grace might look like, you know what, this is the first side arm plank I've done in three months. And I've been sick two out of those three months with pneumonia. And I getting out of bed was like, like you were saying, it was like a victory some of those days. So doing a side arm plank, I'm going to keep doing this, but I'm going to put one knee down to help support myself because
00:08:53
Speaker
I've been through a rough two months and that's, that's what grace is going to look like today. I'm going to keep doing this side arm plank, but I'm going to give myself a little support underneath. Yeah. Um, yeah. So that's like just an example of what in a situation grace versus making excuse might look like.
00:09:13
Speaker
So, grace for myself. What I want to do is consider all the factors involved, like I was just talking about in that little yoga experience. So, you know, am I going through a transition time? Is it a survival time? Are there other external factors that are making this a difficult situation for me? And then something I always need to consider in every situation is that I'm not perfect.
00:09:36
Speaker
I fail every single day and that's because I'm human and I have a human nature. I'm not a perfect individual. So, I do fail every day, but how I react to that failure is what's important here because how I react to the failure in myself is either with grace or
00:09:57
Speaker
just kind of denying it and making excuse. And we'll talk about excuse in a minute, but that's what grace looks like to me, is how I react to the failure in myself.
00:10:11
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. And I love that you brought up exercise. Because think about it. Exercise is the perfect example of
Exercise Analogy: Grace vs. Pushing Limits
00:10:17
Speaker
this. Because let's say, for example, you thought, I'm going to run a marathon. And you ran out there, and you laced up your shoes, and you got all the gear you needed, and you started running. We've talked about this before, right? This example. And when you didn't hit your 26.2 miles the first time, you're like, well, forget it.
00:10:32
Speaker
I'm the worst. Time to give up. I will never run a marathon, right? Marathon running is not for me. Not for me. I'm not a runner, right? Silly, super silly. But exercise is designed to make you fail, right? Every time that you push yourself to your limit, you fail. So if every time you failed an exercise you gave up and thought, well, I'm not meant to exercise, I'm not meant to do yoga because I can't do the sidearm plank.
00:10:54
Speaker
I'm not meant to run because I can't get out there and run a marathon." Well, then you would never exercise, right? Because by virtue of the fact that it's exercise, you have to fail in order to get strong. Your muscles get stronger because they are breaking and repairing, because they're failing over and over and over, right?
00:11:14
Speaker
And sometimes we forget that our mental and psychological capacity is kind of the same. If we want to get better, we have to fail. And it's not pleasant. I mean, exercising is often not pleasant, but the rewards are so amazing if we can just keep going and not just give up, right?
00:11:33
Speaker
Yes, that is so true. I love that analogy. So I asked myself some very similar questions, like you said. Is it a survival time? What are the outside stressors? I had something happen to me recently that was really, really stressful. I've talked about it on Instagram a little bit. It involves some people I love, so I'm not at liberty to talk a lot about it, but it was very, very life altering and really, really stressed me out.
00:11:52
Speaker
And for many weeks, I kept thinking, why can't I remember things? Why can't I do this? Why can't I work harder? Why can't why is my life falling apart? And then I realized, oh, this really stressful life event has happened and it's rock my world. Right. This is an unusual and it was a survival time that I had not acknowledged because it was not right inside my home. You know, sometimes unusual circumstances with your children. Maybe there's a kid who's acting out due to one thing or another. There's bullying or there's health issues or whatever else.
00:12:21
Speaker
So many things as a mom can cause us to fail earlier than we might be used to failing, right? Or quicker. And we need to acknowledge those so that we can give ourselves the grace we deserve. Yes, and not beat ourselves up. If I was a better mom, you know, then fill in the blank. No, just have a little grace with yourself at those times, definitely.
00:12:44
Speaker
So what does excuse look like in ourselves? I find excuse in me looks like blaming my situation on somebody or something else. So I'm just being lazy and I'm blaming it on somebody else. Or I'm unable to do something and it's not my fault, it's somebody else's fault. So usually excuse in me involves blame and also it involves denial. I'm denying that
00:13:13
Speaker
Maybe I need...
00:13:15
Speaker
help in this situation or I need practice or I need experience or I need grace for this situation. And so if I'm denying those things, then I'm also blaming it on someone or something else. And it just kind of, that's what excuse looks like in me. I think I've become newly aware of the concept of blame. I mean, I always know what blame was, but we're going to link it in the show notes. But Bonnie sent me a talk by
00:13:46
Speaker
Is that how you say her name? Right. On blame. It was one of those talks that had a little animation with it, and it made it so clear to my mind. In the beginning of this animation, she spills coffee on herself. She's standing alone in the middle of her kitchen, and she spills coffee on her white sweater, and she blames it on her husband.
00:14:12
Speaker
half a second, she's blamed it on her husband. And it takes her five minutes to explain her thought process that enabled her to be able to blame that on her husband. But yeah, her husband who wasn't even there, right? I think he was already gone to work. Right. Right. So that little video has made me, or the animation, has made me extremely conscious of blame in my life and when I use it and why and how it's just another way of making an excuse.
00:14:42
Speaker
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because that was my first thought too when you started talking about blame as I'm a big fan of Brene Brown's and she talks about blame and shame a lot and how we we hate the idea of being responsible for something that went wrong. And so in order to deflect that pain, we blame someone else. And I realize as a mother, I do this way too often. Well, to be fair, your kids are to blame for.
00:15:05
Speaker
a lot of stuff that happened, right? They leave a toy on the floor and you trip. You know, they, you know, whatever caused you all sorts of pain and suffering just by being born. You know, like there's a lot of things about your children that make life difficult. But if your immediate reaction to something going wrong is to, who do I blame? Who do I blame? Who do I blame? Then maybe there's something at core within us that we need to shift. Right. So I highly recommend all her videos and books. She just is. It's really, really amazing how she talks about that stuff.
00:15:33
Speaker
For me personally, finding out whether I'm making excuses, I ask myself these questions, have I lost my motivation for some reason, right? So sometimes like in these last few weeks of just kind of staying home more, it's hard to find the motivation that I used to have. And then I'm asking myself, well, why have I lost my motivation? Am I filling my days with useless things?
00:15:54
Speaker
Am I watching more TV? Am I reading more books now? Reading books is not necessarily useless, but when it's like hours and hours when I should be taking care of my family, then maybe it's not super healthy, right? I like to also ask myself to pull myself out of my own misery and
00:16:13
Speaker
get kind of this bird's eye view, I'll say, if I continued on this track of what I'm doing every single day, where would I be in five years? Or where would I be in 10 years? Or where would I be in 20 years? Are my daily
Cycles of Productivity and Grace
00:16:22
Speaker
actions adding up to something that will eventually be amazing? Like, you know, to further my career or my motherhood development or my love for my neighbors or whatever I'm trying to do, or will I be way worse of a person? You know what I mean? And so sometimes when I'm in these scenarios, I like to say, well, I'm just gonna have a little bit of,
00:16:42
Speaker
patience and grace with myself. But really, it's because I'm being lazy. It's because I'm filling my days with stuff that is not useful and I've just lost my motivation. And there are a lot of reasons that can happen, but it's not making excuses. It's not a great way to get out of it.
00:16:58
Speaker
Yeah, those are really helpful questions to ask. And they like sometimes we don't like the answers we get when we ask ourselves this kind of questions. But if we want to change ourselves and our behavior for the future, then we need to ask the hard questions. So my like my other thoughts on.
00:17:16
Speaker
grace versus excuse for ourselves is it helps me so much to realize that life in general is cyclical. Some periods of life I'll be more productive, some periods of the day, some periods of the week of the month of the year, I will be more productive. And sometimes I will feel less productive and be able to do more. And like how this ties into grace versus excuse is just kind of go with the flow in the low times.
00:17:42
Speaker
make big decisions that are really kind of excuses. Well, yoga is not for me if I can't do it that day. But just realize that life is cyclical and I am in a low period. And then when I get on the upside of the cycle, take advantage of the extra boost. Because if on the low side I decided that yoga is not for me, then I'll never even attempt yoga again on the high side when I'm feeling up and when I'm feeling good.
00:18:10
Speaker
And this just isn't about yoga. I'm using that as an example, but in anything and everything I do, sometimes I will have very low, unproductive times. And then sometimes I will have, you know, it's like a roller coaster, it goes back up and then it feels, you know, like you can get a lot done. And how come some days you can get a lot done and some days you can't get anything done? Well, it's just a cycle. It just keeps going. So it helps for me to have that picture in mind and to keep
00:18:36
Speaker
Just use grace in the low times and say, okay, this is a low time and I'm just going to do what I can and get through it. And then we'll be going back up again pretty soon. Yes, I love that. And I love the idea of don't give up on anything in a low time, right? Yeah. When you're feeling a little down, don't make big decisions or decide that, you know, wow, give up your career or give up your hobby or give up your, I don't know, a child that's not working. I'm just kidding. But yeah, not a great time to give things up. Okay.
00:19:06
Speaker
So, one last thought on this personal grace versus excuse. I feel like most of us have a baseline for the effort we put forth every day, right? And it really depends on your personality. So, Audrey and I have talked a lot about how we're very kind of type A, I forget what Enneagram that is, but like the, you know, just very go-getter kind of, let's get all the things done and it's a little bit harder for us to relax.
00:19:28
Speaker
So, our baseline might be a little bit higher than some people's because we like to go, go, go. That's how we feel fulfilled, right? And then others who are like more of the fun lovers, their baseline of effort might be a little bit lower because they put value into fun or relationships, etc.
00:19:43
Speaker
So my thought is if we pay attention to our baseline effort, then we only compare ourselves to us, right? Instead of my, I don't know, brother who is the fun lover comparing himself to me who gets fulfilled by doing things, maybe he'd feel bad about himself. Or if I compared my enjoyment of life to his, I feel bad about myself, right? So we're only going to compare ourselves to us and realize, hmm, normally I feel really motivated and I don't today. Why could that be?
00:20:12
Speaker
and just kind of ruminate on it, talk about it, think about it. Instead of constantly scrolling through Instagram and saying, how could she get all these things done and I can't?
00:20:21
Speaker
only compare to your own baseline of effort. Like, do you want to be doing more? If so, great. Like you say, life is cyclical. It'll come time for you to have more energy and a boost to getting things done. Or if you normally get this much done and you're just cranky because everybody else seems to be accomplishing more, that's okay. Maybe it's just time to step away from the internet.
00:20:43
Speaker
Um, if you, if you need help for setting goals for yourself and these small goals to get you moving again, um, you can go back to our goal setting episode for moms. That's episode 52. And then just remember to be gentle with yourself in achieving them. Like I'm going to try start small. I'm going to start with five seconds of the sidearm plank, right? And then maybe next week I can do 10 seconds and then et cetera. So right.
00:21:07
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. So now
Teaching Grace to Children
00:21:09
Speaker
let's move on to teaching grace versus excuse to our children. So, um, you know, when we have children is our responsibility to teach them something. So first about teaching grace to our children. So I don't know if you've seen it in your kids. I'm sure every parent has seen it in their kids.
00:21:27
Speaker
Kids can be heartbreakingly hard on themselves sometimes. You know, they draw a picture and they're like, this is stupid. I'm never going to be a good artist. I hate this. They crumple it up and throw it in the trash. I have seen, you know, lots of my kids do that. And every time I see one of my kids do that, I ask myself, OK, is this an innate behavior that they have or is this something they've learned by watching me and the way I behave?
00:21:56
Speaker
and react to my own failures and disappointments. Like, am I crumpling up my effort and throwing it in the trash because it didn't work out? So how do we teach grace to our children? I don't know, it's hard. It's the same things we try to do for ourselves. I try to teach my children to have respect for themselves. And I know that we talked about this in other episodes, but we do discourage competition between our kids and
00:22:26
Speaker
maybe competitive sports, even because these things have winners and losers. And so if you have a child that, I mean, some of my kids seem more prone to judging themselves harshly than others. And I like these children that are more critical of themselves. I just like teaching them
00:22:50
Speaker
how do you say it? You can't really protect them from experiences where they're going to feel like a loser. But if you teach them to respect themselves, then when they go through a situation where there's a winner or a loser, then they can gracefully, like going back to that definition, with beauty and elegance, they can accept their
00:23:11
Speaker
their defeat, whether that's personal defeat or whatever, they can learn to have a little grace, a little beauty come forth out of themselves in a time when maybe their first instinct would be to be critical of themselves. Wow, that's a great point. Yeah, and I love that first definition of grace, that beauty and elegance that you said. Yes. Because how often do we look at our initial attempts at things and call them beautiful or elegant?
00:23:41
Speaker
Usually we do what your kid does, right? We crumple up the paper. We're like, forget it. I am not a painter. I am not a this. I'm not a writer. I'm not a... That's terrible, right? It's your first time or your fifth time or your hundredth time. Like if it takes 10,000 hours to accomplish, you know, to like being a master at something, then it's going to be terrible for a long time, right? So I love that. Sharing with them that every attempt is beautiful, even if it doesn't look that way at the outset, you know?
00:24:10
Speaker
Right, right. And it's like teaching them what you said earlier about failure, that when we fail, it teaches us something and then we can learn from that failure and go on. Right. It's the only
Blame and Responsibility in Parenting
00:24:22
Speaker
way we're going to learn is by failing.
00:24:23
Speaker
So once again, in teaching grace to your kids, once again, certain personalities are gonna be harder on themselves than others. And it's important to realize that. I'm sure you've had this happen too before, Audrey, where you look at some kids and go, oh my gosh, you're doing great. Seriously, why are you so hard on yourself? Your effort is phenomenal. And other kids, you're like, you should probably put forth more effort. Like, come on, kid.
00:24:44
Speaker
Some are more of the go-getters and some are not. And one is not right and one is not wrong and one is not better or worse. They just have different strengths. And so it's important not to project our own personalities on our kids and say, you're having grace right now when I think you're making an excuse, right? Now, to a certain extent, we have to teach our kids hard work, et cetera. But that's something they'll have to figure out on their own eventually, especially as they become teenagers. Like, all right, are you being hard enough on yourself or are you being too hard on yourself?
00:25:12
Speaker
One other thought about this is I had a conversation with a friend recently where she was concerned about a daughter who was very in tune with other people's feelings and so she was constantly feeling guilty or responsible for when other people felt badly, right? And I think this is a point
00:25:28
Speaker
Like a really important point in parenting is that we need to teach our children that they are not responsible for other people's feelings or actions, right? This is like the life coaching model, right? You're only responsible. You can only change your own feelings and actions, right? You cannot change anyone else's. And so when they look at other people's actions and they think, oh, well, if only I, this XYZ, no, you can only focus on yours. And whatever happens after that is out of your control and that's okay.
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah, that is so true. I'm glad you brought that up. So what about teaching our children to recognize excuse in themselves? It's like kids are masters at making excuses. And like some of our humor segments are about the excuses that kids have made because they're so cute. I mean, the ingenious ways they come up with it. Blaming something on somebody else. So yeah, first of all, we have to teach them to recognize what blame is and when they're doing it.
00:26:26
Speaker
And blame is really not being honest with themselves. So when they're blaming it on somebody else, they're really not being honest about putting the bacon in their own yogurt. A little dishonesty there, right? Blaming it on her brother. Yeah. So they need to recognize that. And oftentimes, most times, kids know when they're doing this. And when we point it out to them, they're like, huh? Oh, yeah. Yeah, you're right, mom.
00:26:57
Speaker
But if we don't, you know, kind of bring them up on it, then they'll think they could go on and think, well, it's okay. It's okay if we don't point out to them that that is not really the right way to behave.
00:27:10
Speaker
Then another thought I had on this to recognize excuse in themselves is to be careful of comparing themselves to others' comparison. This is like an excuse. They're laying on their back on the couch doing nothing. They look across the room and they see their sibling.
00:27:29
Speaker
laying on their back, on their couch, on the other couch, doing nothing, and on their phone. And they say, oh, well, at least I'm not on an electronic device. You know, mom told us both to mop the kitchen floor, but hey, at least I'm not on electronic device. So teaching them to hold themselves to a standard that is not somebody who's doing something worse than they are. This literally just happened in my house, only they were comparing themselves to me.
00:27:56
Speaker
I was sitting, I was sitting there doing, we've had like three puzzles out all week just to entertain ourselves, you know, because we can't go out. And so I was working on a puzzle this morning and I said, hey, so-and-so, have you done any work? I think all you've done this morning is worked on a puzzle. That's all you're doing. I'm like, oh, oh, oh. Except I'm the mom and I made breakfast and lunch and took care of all these kids. Like, pardon me for sitting down. Oh, that makes me so mad. Go to your room. That's it.
00:28:23
Speaker
Oh, yep. I would say once again, in teaching kids about making excuses, we need to teach them goal setting to begin with, right?
Goal Setting and Learning from Failure
00:28:32
Speaker
To make progress in their own life. If they don't see us setting goals and trying to improve ourselves, then they're probably not going to do it.
00:28:39
Speaker
themselves unless they're just total go-getters that don't need an example of it. We have a goal-setting episode for kids as well. And if we teach them this in a positive, emotionally neutral atmosphere, then they realize that, oh, this is just what we do. We make goals and then we go for them. And we don't shame them when they don't reach them. We just say, okay, why do you think that didn't happen? And you can walk them through that process of, do you think it was because something outside of your control happened and it was just a time to let it go? Or
00:29:06
Speaker
was it just because you got a little bit tired or you got a little bit lazy and you needed to push yourself more, right? When things get overwhelming, they can have a standard to measure themselves by saying, like that baseline I was saying, well, let's see, last month I was doing really good at exercising, this month I didn't. Okay, why is that? And just to analyze how things went, what's going on outside of them, et cetera. Yeah, they don't have these
00:29:30
Speaker
Like we have to teach it to them and help them see how to do these processes themselves. So yeah, those are great thoughts. So I have another thought on grace versus excuse, teaching it to our kids. And that is kids who learn to hold themselves to a standard, they grow up to be upstanding individuals in society. They're the builders, the creators, the producers, because they're holding themselves to a standard. And kids who learn to have grace with themselves,
00:30:00
Speaker
they learn to have grace with others. So they in society are the, maybe the helpers and the teachers and the healers. And both those are extremely necessary in all societies. Yeah, totally.
00:30:20
Speaker
My final thought on your kids is that you will probably be a better judge of where your kids lie on that spectrum of how much they get done until they get older, right? Until they're maybe 12 or 13, you can probably see better than they can, whether they're being lazy or...
00:30:35
Speaker
whether they need to offer themselves some grace. So keep that in mind that you have to be the mature one to recognize that and not push them too hard. But then when they get to become teenagers, hopefully they will have learned from your own example and your discussions that, you know, when to push and when to let go. But I just think it's important for us to be gentle with our kids' beginning efforts because it takes them a while to figure that out. Yeah. Kids, little kids' excuses are kind of cute and funny. Teenagers' excuses are usually
00:31:04
Speaker
barbed and pointed back at us. Oftentimes, it's our fault, right? That they can't, you know, do whatever. So, yeah, you want to, you don't want to deal with teenagers who make excuses. I mean, you know, whatever. They don't do, but let's work on it before we get there. Okay.
Grace in Interactions with Others
00:31:22
Speaker
And our final section we're going to cover is dealing with
00:31:25
Speaker
using grace and dealing with excuses in others. This is not an area where we have control over others. We only have control over our own reactions to others' behaviors. So this isn't something where we try to go around and have control like we do with our children or with ourselves. But this is a little bit different aspect because it's on other people that we do not have control over or should not be trying to control.
00:31:52
Speaker
Right, that's so important and yet so difficult to realize. It is really hard for me especially. Like I mentioned before, I'm kind of a doer so I expect others to be the same. Like I can't tell you how many times I've been folding laundry at 10.30 at night and looked over at my husband who's relaxing on the couch and thinking, why is he not still doing?
00:32:09
Speaker
I'm doing. Well, you know, because he works for rest too, but I don't feel, I don't get fulfilled by rest. I get fulfilled by productivity. And so if I have downtime, I would rather be doing something in my downtime, whereas he needs to rest because that's how he feels fulfilled. And I'm holding everyone to my standard and it's not fair.
00:32:28
Speaker
I think in this scenario when dealing with other people, I think it's very essential to recognize that everyone is most likely trying their best. Just assume that. Just assume, even if it's not true, let's just assume that everyone outside of us is trying their best and then it becomes natural for us to extend grace and kindness to others, the same grace and kindness that we would want shown to us, right? It's so easy to blame and point fingers and say, you're not this, you're not that.
00:32:58
Speaker
But generally, kindness is always the answer, right? I've also heard the thought that if we just naturally assume that everyone we meet is going through a hard time, more often than not, we'll be right. And that will make us want to err on the side of kindness.
00:33:16
Speaker
Yeah. You know, that is really become apparent in this worldwide pandemic because everybody is dealing with a hardship or whatever, whatever is coming out of them. We can just assume, oh, this is because of this virus that's worldwide and everybody's, everybody's struggling with this. And so like it, that's made one thing clear that everybody is struggling with something. Yeah, totally.
00:33:42
Speaker
My thought on grace for others, it comes from another definition of grace, kind of more spiritual definition, is undeserved kindness, being able to approach our Creator God.
00:33:54
Speaker
even though we don't deserve to. So grace for others means, because of a deep spiritual connection I have with my Creator, it means I realize I'm granted grace every day, and I need to turn around and extend that grace and that kindness to others. So it's being kind when someone treats you wrong.
00:34:14
Speaker
Uh, it's like, it's like a flower. So you take a rose petal and you grind it under your heel. What happens? You smell the most beautiful smell, don't you? And that's like, that's to me, what grace, how I need to be toward others is, um, you know, somebody does me wrong than just a beautiful smell comes forth. Something beautiful and elegant comes, comes forth out of me, undeserved kindness.
00:34:39
Speaker
Yeah. And I would say that in reality, which of us deserves kindness? Probably none of us, right? None of us has lived a life so great that we deserve kindness nonstop. And yet we all want it. We all thrive best with it. So if we can reach out to others in kindness, we'll be a lot more likely to get it as well, I think.
00:34:58
Speaker
Um, so moving on to the excuses when, when others offer us excuses, this can be difficult, especially when you are working with someone.
Communication about Excuses
00:35:07
Speaker
Okay. So these are the examples I thought when you're working in business or you have a business relationship or like a volunteer relationship or a neighbor relationship or really any reason to come together with a person and they offer excuses when they're supposed to be
00:35:22
Speaker
doing projects or something with you, that can be very, very frustrating. That's the first thing I thought about when dealing with other people and their excuses. But there's a number of things we can do to fix this. Number one is just communicate, right? Sometimes when we see other people making excuses for things they haven't done, it's really just miscommunication, right? Like, oh, they assumed they were supposed to do this. I assume they were supposed to do this. This was the breakdown in communication. Tell people when they're not meeting your expectations, right? Like, I have an example of when I was working with someone
00:35:52
Speaker
in a capacity at church. We were supposed to be doing a project together and this person just continually didn't show up and didn't do
00:36:01
Speaker
they're part of the bargain. And I was just really, really frustrated until it came out that this person had some health problems that he was struggling with. And I had no idea this person was constantly in pain. And so just that communication opened my eyes to, oh, it must be a struggle just for this person to get out of bed every day, let alone function on this project that I was expecting them to do to my standards, right? And then it can always be important to verbally acknowledge that you appreciate this person, right? So I think about,
00:36:31
Speaker
even within my family. When kids or husbands or whoever is making excuses for things, I can just say, you know what, thank you so much for how you do help me. Thank you for everything that you do day in, day out. I know it's got to be a hard time for you or this must be difficult, etc. before then asking, but I'd appreciate more help.
00:36:53
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking about how to deal with excuses in others. Have you ever been in a situation where there's a bunch of people standing around a room and one person is very obviously making some sort of excuse for their behavior and everybody else just kind of like looks at each other out of the corner of their eye and they don't really know how to respond. I'm sure we've all been in situations like that. So, you know, someone's making an excuse. How do we deal with that?
00:37:19
Speaker
Well, first of all, we can't control other people's actions, other people's blame, other people's excuses, but we can and we must control our own reaction to it and to this person who's doing the excusing or the blaming.
00:37:37
Speaker
are the actions that are not acceptable. And that is the thing that we do have control of. So distance when possible, again, this is like the Brené Brown episode, but she has a very good topic discussion that she does on boundaries.
00:37:56
Speaker
distance, distance when possible. If there's a person who's repeatedly blaming you or making excuses or whatever, distance is your answer when possible. And then, you know, like you said, if it's family or close family, obviously we can't disown our family, really.
00:38:12
Speaker
And that's when we need to use grace. So how to deal with excuses and others, the answer for me is just, you know, distance or grace. Boundaries are grace or maybe both, right? Right, right.
00:38:27
Speaker
I do think that when it comes to family relationships outside of our immediate family, those can be very difficult because they are our family, so you don't want to sever relationships. But yeah, but the boundaries come into play a lot there for sure. And then creating enough boundaries so that you can offer grace, right? Because when those boundaries get crossed, then you're just feeling attacked and, ah, get out of my space, whatever. Yeah, totally.
00:38:53
Speaker
Probably need to do a whole episode on extended family. Oh my goodness. Yeah, a couple episodes, right?
00:39:02
Speaker
Every episode from here on out. Yeah, seriously. Okay, just a few final thoughts from me on this topic. I just want to acknowledge that life is difficult. It is difficult very often and sometimes all the time it seems like lately, right? But it doesn't mean that we should be complacent, right? Just because life is hard, it doesn't mean that we should look for excuses constantly. Well, I wouldn't eat better, but you know, there was no broccoli at the grocery store when I went there. Although actually, I think there's a lot of broccoli. There's a lot of produce, but no Twinkies. Everybody's taking all this.
00:39:36
Speaker
If we're having a hard time, okay, so I think that if I'm having a hard time accurately measuring my own progress, then there are a few people that I can ask for help with this, right? First person I usually ask is my husband.
00:39:50
Speaker
Am I making excuses? Help me out here. Am I? Or do I need to have more grace for myself? Like I said, I tend to be more of a go-getter, so I tend to not allow myself to make excuses when sometimes I should. I remember talking to a friend recently and saying, I just can't do this. I can't do that. And she says, well, what about this you've been dealing with? Or what about this? And she was able to help me find my strength that I had forgotten about.
00:40:13
Speaker
and also things in my life that may have been weighing me down, right? So you can ask someone who you love, like a spouse or a friend. You can also ask someone who doesn't know you very well. And the reason I think this is helpful is sometimes a third party who's not close to this scenario can say, yeah, I think you are making a few excuses. Whereas your spouse might be like, oh, no, you're fine. You're okay. You know?
00:40:33
Speaker
Someone to hold you to kind of a higher standard. And then finally, ask God, right? For the peace to know that you're doing your best. And if you're not, then I think you'll know that too. So people outside of your own life can give you more of that bird's eye view to help you know whether you are making the best effort you can or whether you should just sit and be at peace with your effort.
Final Reflections on Grace and Excuses
00:40:57
Speaker
Right, right. Husbands can be such a good mirror to look into to see what's going on. All right, so my final thought is that we need to apply the proper medicine or treatment to the situation. So does the experience we're in call for grace or are we just making excuses? So we need to know when to apply grace to our situation and when to recognize that we're just making an excuse and we need to
00:41:25
Speaker
Stop the denial and stop the blame and get honest in the situation and move forward.
00:41:31
Speaker
And so learning to recognize the difference between the two. I was thinking about it, you know, could we say it's a line? I don't know if it's a line. I think it's a gray area, right? But the more that we practice it, the smaller the gray area becomes and the closer it does become to a line. So that was kind of my final thoughts, was just practice this exercise of having grace with yourself
00:41:56
Speaker
and recognizing when you're making an excuse, like this analysis can help us to perfect our judgment. Right, right. All right, so we have some recommendations, and like we said, this is the Brené Brown episode, so we're going to link to her talk on the blame and boundaries, and then we're going to link to a couple of her books that you can check out if you wish, Daring Greatly and the Gifts of Imperfection.
00:42:23
Speaker
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00:42:32
Speaker
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00:43:02
Speaker
Children who have, children who learn that excuse is okay grew up to be the, in jail. Just kidding. I'm not planning to include that in the edit. I think you should. I hadn't thought about that, but I was like, well, I talked about it. Okay, I'm right. They're just lazy and get in trouble.