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Excuses, excuses, excuses...

Today I was reminded of that Kenny Chestney song... "so damn easy to say that life's too hard..." as I was giving my students the final notes for their TOEFL test experience.

The board read "Handling stress during test" and it had 5 points which we found to be key in their success. As we're going along the points, which featured keeping things under perspective, facing your fears, being prepared, stop making excuses and visualization, I was telling them about the fact that excuses are a way of us trying to blame others for our faliures when the fact of the matter is that the only ones who hang ourselves in anything in life is us.

So when test comes, I said, stop making excuses for your own faliures. The lights aren't too bright, the sun ain't too hot and you know the language better than you expect yourself to know. One of my students then said, "but the AC is too hot!" It's not, I said, and that's an excuse. "but it is! we cannot concentrate with the heat and I need it to be cool..." It's an excuse. Not all classrooms have AC and the one we have here is keeping it very cool for the computers to work properly. He got all pissy and didn't even bother to pay attention the rest of the class...

And we're talking about people in unviersity level here, not five year olds...

It's easy to make excuses for our faliures. It's easy to say that it's too hard or that the AC is too low, or that the noise in the stadium is too loud and we cannot concentrate. It's easier to blame those factors rather than to look deep inside and see what we are doing wrong to sabotage ourselves.

So, quoting Mr Chestney... 
So damn easy to say that life's so hard... everybody's got their share of battle scars... as for me, I'd like to thank my lucky stars that I'm alive and well..
 PS. I would like to take this opportunity to give a very big HURRAY because Mexico defeated France 2-0 in the South Africa World Cup. Gooo Mexa team!!

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