If you want to achieve your dream, you will need to stop making excuses and start marching. Excuses are your worst enemy.

It’s easy to sit around, blaming others or your circumstances. It’s easy to wallow in that pity party, thinking that “they” are preventing you from living your dream life. But really – will blaming “them” help at all?

If you want to live your dreams, you need to start making changes – starting with yourself and your attitude. Do you have the dreaded “I can’t do it because I don’t have…” kind of thinking? Why accept failure when you can go out and make changes that can lead you to success?

Success lies within each and every individual. If you really want to move on but don’t know how to stop making excuses, here are some ways to help you.

Identify excuses and reasons why you can’t achieve your dream

The first thing you need to do is to accept that you have been using excuses as your defense. Are you too busy? Or don’t have enough money? Are you too fat, too thin, too short, too tall, too old, or too young? Are you scared of failure? Or the unknown? What is it that is preventing you from moving forward? Identify it. Be honest with yourself – it’s not easy, but essential.

After accepting your excuses, create a list of them. A written list; it’s too easy to ignore a mental list. Write down every reason you can think of why your dreams are not achievable.

Move on from the past

It’s possible that those reasons – those excuses, if you will – were valid reasons at some point in the past. Are they still? Were they ever? Evaluate them honestly and you’ll find most of them never were valid reasons. Excuses are powerful things.

Look ahead to the opportunities in front of you. Don’t focus on the excuses you made in the past.

State your expectations

After identifying your opportunities, sit down and try to state your expectations. Be ready to accept any blame that may arise due to failure and not direct it onto others. Let people advise you but don’t let them make decisions for you. Stop lying and be honest with yourself. Realistically, what do you expect to happen?

 After 21 years as a classroom teacher, Nancy Sathre-Vogel decided life was too short to spend with other people’s kids, so she quit her job to spend time with her own. Together with her husband and twin sons, she spent a total of four years cycling the Americas, including a jaunt from Alaska to Argentina. She has written a book about her experiences – Changing Gears: A Family Odyssey to the End of the World.