If you’ve spent much time around kids, you’ve probably encountered some iteration of the classic “he did it!” situation: child, standing in guilt next to the broken this or spilled that, vehemently insisting on their innocence and casting the blame on anyone or anything in sight. It was her! It was the dog! A ghost! Anyone but me! It’s easy to chuckle at this trope, but it’s indicative of something bigger, something that adults are guilty of doing just as much as (and perhaps more than) children: pointing the finger. Challenges come up, failures happen, and our first inclination is to find something, anything to blame it on. In some sense, this is a safety measure. It’s easy to be comfortable in your failure if the story you spin in your head says you weren’t in control.

This isn’t to say that we are 100% in control of our lives. Life is full of circumstances out of our control, and that’s okay. But the reality remains that we do have some control, and whether that accounts for 1% or 99% of the way your life goes, it doesn’t really matter: it’s still 100% of what you can change, and that’s where the focus should be.

Of course this all comes back to fitness. We’re all “too” something, “just not really a” something else, and “not made for” another thing. Too short. Too skinny. Just not really a runner. Not made for squatting. We all have our first line of defense favorites to throw out whenever we might have to look failure in the eye for a moment, and conveniently all of these objects of our blame are out of our control.

Well, the big secret here is that regardless of how true it is that you’re just too this and not built for that, nothing’s going to change until you start pointing that finger back at yourself. It’s okay to not be great at something right away, and it’s absolutely okay to fail. But it’s not okay to allow yourself to be defeated by your excuses.