When you go to your doctor with a medical problem, you’re prepared to answer questions designed to help him or her determine what’s going on and what treatment plan to initiate. When it comes to those mental crutches you’ve relied upon for so many years, it will help you to become your own doctor and to learn the origin and duration of your “condition” before you implement treatment. Just like physical problems, habituated thinking patterns that keep you from attaining the life of your dreams can be remedied by knowing how and why they occurred.

Using the same model of an “intake interview” that your medical doctor would conduct, here are five questions that will help you understand where your excuses come from:

1. What Are Your Symptoms?
   Imagine the excuses you’ve employed as symptoms that have been keeping you from maximizing your potential for happiness, success, and health—even if they may not be as obvious as a fever, a runny nose, a sore throat, or any other physical symptom that would cause you to seek out medical attention.
   Describe what you’re feeling when you know you’ve got the excuse bug. Common symptoms include: frequent episodes of blame and faultfinding, when just about anyone or anything that you think of is held responsible for your unhappiness; shame that sneakily attacks you; anger at yourself and others, which erupts at the tiniest irritation; envy that breaks out when you compare yourself to others; and laziness, inactivity, and complaining. As the excuse bug takes hold, self-doubt, resentment, anxiety, worry, hopelessness, sadness, unworthiness, and more may also occur.
2. When Did Your Symptoms First Appear?
   Your symptoms could very well stem from childhood memories that still persist in adult versions. For example, the rationalization I’m too old may have appeared as I’m too young when you were a teenager; and the adult excuse I’m too busy might have originated as I can’t play with my friends because I have to do my chores, study, and get to bed when you were in school. 
   These lifelong thinking habits have become so incorporated into your being that only now are you beginning to see them as symptomatic of a disease process. While there’s no remedy for the conditions you were exposed to that contributed to the presence of your “excuses disease” today, you can now see how you were infected at an early age.
3. Whom Were You With?
   Simply knowing whom you were with when you came down with your excuses disease unfortunately won’t change it. Those people you were with when you caught so many self-defeating thinking habits should be pretty obvious. They include your parents and grandparents; teachers, classmates, and friends; members of religious organizations; and even folks who appeared on the television programs you watched, in the magazines and newspapers you read, and in the music you listened to. You can realistically answer that it was most everyone and everything you came into regular contact with from the earliest moments of your life.
4. Did the People You Were Around Have Similar Symptoms?
   If you were being medically treated for a disease, it would be important to curtail its spread—not only would you need to be treated accordingly, but whomever you caught it from would need to be, too. In addition, you’d be told how to minimize endangering others, and you might even be isolated to stop the epidemic from growing.
   Obviously, medication or isolation aren’t called for here, but you do need to make the decision to rehabilitate yourself if you are to overcome lifelong habituated thinking habits.
   While you were growing up and being exposed to the excuses disease, you were unaware of what was happening. This isn’t a reason to blame anyone—rather, this is all about seeing that in your earliest years, you were a magnet for the energy that was directed at you. And as you got older, you didn’t exactly stop pulling excuses toward you and start attracting and nourishing the ways that would have allowed you to outgrow them.
5. Were You Exposed?
   The short answer here is yes. Of course you were exposed, because you had daily contact with carriers of mind viruses. However, the Excuses Begone! paradigm is designed to strengthen your natural immune system so that you can deal with any similar disease processes that may come your way, now and in the future.