Dear 24-year-old self, Your excuses are sacrificing relationships

Dear 24-year-old self, your excuses are sacrificing relationships

Dear 24 year old self. I hope you pay attention. The people you are making excuses to other relationships, you are sacrificing. I'm your host, Tiffany Sauder. And this is Scared Confident if you work at element three. No doubt. You've heard me say this one because it really, to me is my lesson in. Balance.

So lesson number five in our series of dear 24 year old self is the people you are making excuses to are the relationships you are sacrificing. So I'll repeat that for you. The people who are getting your excuses are the relationships you are sacrificing. So let me again, give you the backstory on how this lesson was brought forward.

So there were seasons that were years, uh, at element three where it was my first priority. If you would have asked me on any of those days in any of those years, what my number one priority was, I would have told you my. Because that is the thing that people are supposed to say, but the truth of my time was not that my family was my first priority and where I saw this was in this idea of excuses.

So what would happen is I would. Do my day, I come and do my calendar. I do all the meetings and then the day would be over and I would be chatting, probably something that was important with people after work in the office about like, yeah. What about the presentation tomorrow? And are you prepped and can you review this and did you respond to this email and can you sign this thing?

Whatever it was. And I would have told my husband or my nanny or my family, I'm going to be home by six 15. Lots of times what would happen is I would be home between 6 45 and seven 30 or whatever the time was. I wouldn't hit the time. I said, and I would walk in spouting that to the house, spouting a bunch of excuses.

Oh my word. I'm so sorry. This person came into my office and then my phone rang and the client and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, excuses, excuses about why I wasn't there. When I said I was going to be, and what I realized one night, when I was thinking about this, it caused, as you can imagine, lots of tension in our relationship, lots of tension in our marriage, lots of tension, just in our, like even friendship, frankly, between my husband and I, and my availability with the kids is that never once did I show up for a meeting?

Let's say with a client and say like, oh my word, I'm sorry that I didn't get this proved, but I just got caught up in like a mad game of bingo last night with my kids and got distracted and lost track of time. And like, I'm so sorry, but I was having such a ball. I didn't get your stuff done. I never was like, you know what, I'm going to move this four 30 meeting so that I can.

Get home early so that I can be there. When the kids get off the bus. I never did that stuff. I never moved work things to create room for family. I was always moving family to create room for work. And I started to realize that my family was getting my excuses. Nobody at work was getting my excuses. They were only getting my performance.

Now this is not to say that today work gets my excuses and family gets my performance. The goal is to get to a place where both get your performance. Keep your commitments and the things that you say you're going to do and be to all of the people who need things from you. The goal for my life is to get things to a place where it's sustainable.

You cannot live in an unsustainable capacity for a long time. That's like probably the definition of unsustainable. So when you get in these seasons or if you're stuck in one, or if you created one. Like I did where you find that one population or the other is just getting a ton of excuses from you could be a border on, it could be a church that you're, you know, you're over committed and it could be, I don't know, a family commitment that an extended family commitment that you need to walk away from.

Like whoever's getting our excuses. Those are the relationships we're sacrificing. Just know that that is true. And the question you need to ask yourself is. Are those the people I want to be getting my excuses are those, the relationships I want to be sacrificing for me, it was no, it was like my husband and kids, like not a great place to start with relationships that you're sacrificing.

But the other ones might be, yeah, those are fine. I'm fine. With those relationships being sacrificed. They're not in my core. Maybe you just need to walk away from the commitment because it's not serving your current reality anymore. It's not serving your current commitments. And so it's better just to say, like, I need to step back from this, but that's like, we're stuck at that generally.

So the takeaway is be aware when you walk into conversations, if it's filled with a bunch of excuses, Is that a relation that you relationship that you intend to be sacrificing or are those core to who you are and who you would say your priorities are for me? I needed to look in the mirror. I need to rework some things and needed to change some priorities.

And it didn't actually functionally mean. That that much needed to change. I didn't have to leave element three for that to work, but I did have to get to a place where I kept my commitments to my family. And I think if you would ask my husband, he would say I'm much better at this today. So be careful our actions and our time have implications on the relationships that we are building.

And while we intend for the right things to be our priority, interrogate your time and interrogate your words.

So what else is on your mind? Text me 3 1 7 3 500. 8 9 2 1 3 1 7 3 5 0 8 9 21. And be sure to follow along on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening today. .

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