If there’s one habit that cripples more dreams than anything else, it’s making excuses. Life rarely goes according to plan, but responding with excuses only turns a bad situation into worse.

There’s a big difference between giving an explanation, and making an excuse. Excuses harbor guilt and shame—a protective veneer for avoiding a deeper issue. They rationalize bad behaviors, and set the table for a mediocre life.

Here are 12 steps to permanently remove excuses from your life:

1. Awareness leads to change

How often do you make excuses? For seven days, be on high-alert for any attempts at rationalizing bad behavior. Chalk them up in your journal. Write out the incident that sparked off your excuse.

2. Remove the criticism 

Excuses are produced from negative self-talk. When there’s looming judgement, you’ll scramble for justification. Removing criticism also removes the need to make excuses.

It doesn’t mean indifference toward your faults, but detaching yourself from the shame.

3. Shift to solutions

As you get better at catching your excuse-making, begin to shift your mindset from rationalizing to creating solutions.

If emotional nakedness got as much attention as physical nakedness, we’d be much happier.

Of course, it’s not about baring your soul and putting your emotions behind a loudspeaker; it’s about being in-tune with your emotions—being as familiar and aware of our emotional selves as we are with our physical selves.

But it’s not as easy because they’re not as obvious. Emotions can arise mysteriously and be misleading, often going against our better judgment. We get angry over what’s fickle, upset with what’s spoken in jest, and fall in love with the wrong people.

Happiness comes in being congruent with your emotions, to be aligned with them. Oscar Wilde said, “I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, and to enjoy them.”

Emotions can be broken down into 3 major components:

• Subjective—your perception, awareness, and experience of the emotion.
• Physiological—how your body reacts to the emotion.
• Expressive—your actions and behavioral response to the emotion.

To say something is “clear as mud” isn’t complimentary. We prefers things to be logical, neat, and linear. The problem is, life doesn’t play according to our rules.

Light is the perfect example and metaphor for life; paradoxically behaving like a wave and particle—sometimes it passes through glass, sometimes it bounces off. Likewise, our rigid rules for life need to be traded in for a flexible approach; less like concrete, more like water.

Here are 7 paradoxical truths to embrace for a meaningful life:

1. To be and to do.

In the blue corner, Benjamin Franklin says “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing;” in the red corner, Alan Watts says, “The meaning of life is just to be alive. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”

Both express important aspects of life. Watts is speaking against the rat-race that robs us of the joys of simply being present. Franklin highlights the potential we possess to leave an indelible mark—that great achievements are made by people no different to ourselves.

In Greek mythology, Narcissus was praised by the gods for his unmatched beauty and extraordinary physique. Walking by a lake one day, he bent down to drink some water. Narcissus was mesmerized by his own beauty, but gripped with sorrow—unable to be with his own reflection, he died by bank of the lake.

The myth and moral against vanity and conceit is where we get the word narcissism. While self-absorption and egoism is unhealthy—so is having zero self-interest.

We think and live on extremes; to avoid selfishness, we swing to opposite end of the spectrum and end up in a detrimental self-abandonment. We forget the middle-ground.

Indeed the famous commandment even says “Love your neighbor as yourself.” You can only express what you experience, and explain what you understand. To love others without loving yourself is like trying to tell someone about a movie you’ve never seen. 

Here are 7 healthy ways to love yourself without the narcissism:

1. A self-gratitude list.

We know gratitude reduces stress and boosts your immune system...