Excuses

We all make excuses for why something goes wrong. It's pretty natural.

Back when I was newer to taiko, I had a check-in meeting with Staff members and one thing I was told flat-out was to stop making so many excuses. It might have been about why I messed up a solo, or why I said something a certain way, or even about what events I couldn't attend. The point was simple: accept your mistakes, own up to them, apologize, and move on.

It's not like they expected me to be perfect, but I eventually realized what was really annoying to them. It wasn't that I had excuses, it was that my first instinct was to bring them up. Excuses were my defense mechanism, and they kept me from growing as both an artist and as a person.

If someone told me, "you're using too much syncopation in that section, people are losing you," I would reply that it wasn't that difficult; other people need to listen more. If someone told me "you're hitting too hard," I would tell them that it was because I was trying to get the stance just right and wasn't thinking about the arms. If someone told me anything, I had a reason why it just wasn't my fault. And in doing so, I fell into a trap where instead of learning from my mistakes, I spent my energy on excuses.

I'm still prone to a defensive excuse every now and then; I'm only human. Most of us are going to do it when someone points out a flaw of ours. It's hard for me now when I see people relying on excuses the same way I used to. I want to call them out on it the same way it was done to me; not out of a sense of revenge, but because it was effective!

Frequent excuses and refusals to admit mistakes say way more about you than the mistakes themselves do. People lose respect for you and stop listening to what you have to say. So avoid the easy way out! Start listening to what people are telling you and see if you can't learn from a good dose of honest inner dialogue.