Motives for Making Excuses

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Summary: One motive for making excuses is maintaining self-esteem. Learn how to prevent offenses in conversations from a communications instructor and professional speaker in this free video.

Views: 243 | Tags: healthy, relationships, communication, interpersonal, conversation, offenses, disclaimers, excuses, gossip

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About the Expert

Tracy Goodwin Tracy Goodwin has a master’s in corporate communication and 10 years experience in professional speaking. Recipient of numerous public speaking awards and is ... read more

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Video Transcript

Motives for Making Excuses

We are, we have a reason for making excuses, and primarily it is to save our self-esteem. We want to maintain and project a certain image, and primarily a positive image. We want to project this image to the people that we work with, to the people that we're friends with, to family. We even want to project this positive self-image to ourself. So that's one of the main reasons why we make excuses, is we don't want to look bad. We want you to like us, we want you to think that we're wonderful. This is also, we also do this as an effort to reduce stress and tension. I've screwed up, I've said something wrong, and now there's a problem. There's a conflict in this relationship, and it's very stressful, it's very tense. And I don't like that. So let me make an excuse to see if I can make that go away. What excuses can do or they cannot do, but what they can do is to maintain an efficient, effective relationship. That's if you are a good excuse maker. I'm not talking about meaning you make up good excuses, meaning you don't abuse excuse making. And we're going to talk about that in just a little bit.