Excuse Removal Blueprint Second Edition: 7 Steps to Your Greatest Breakthrough

By Nate Lindquist

This is an in-your-face reality check about why you haven't achieved the level of success you've been striving for. Nate Lindquist masterfully shines a light on the patterns in your life from youth through to this morning's breakfast; patterns that until now, have been roadblocks to your success. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Innerspire, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218950750

Nate Lindquist

Nate Lindquist is a husband, father, entrepreneur, endurance runner, and singer. As an energetic and passionate entrepreneur, Nate has led hundreds of small-to-medium-sized businesses launches and has invested in, founded, and run a number of successful businesses, including a marketing and growth consulting firm that he ran for nearly two decades--generating millions of dollars' worth of sales in the process. From as early as the age of six, Nate has been fascinated with the study of personal growth and development. Around age fourteen, Nate developed a keen interest in the process of building, marketing, and growing businesses. Nate's early fascinations, as well as his extensive and varied work experience, have led him to where he is today: CEO of Innerspire, Inc., a peak performance coaching and growth consulting firm. He is known as "The Minimalist CEO", a thought leader in business and personal growth strategy. Innerspire's mission through The Minimalist CEO programs is to help business owners cut the fat and waste, do less, but what's essential, achieve more and life fully, while building or reworking their business to become a Minimalist CEO "freedom style" business. His company provides strategic coaching and consulting to businesses, business leaders and professionals.

Book preview

Introduction:

WELCOME TO THE TEST

"We excuse ourselves from creating the amazing life of our dreams because we think we only have access to the powers of our current self, which are limited. We must upgrade our self by first making a decision, then taking action to access the unlimited resources of our new Excuse-Free self. That’s when we experience the life of our dreams."

—NATE LINDQUIST

Let’s take a moment and explore the gravity of life’s most difficult moments. The ones where all the facts, intel, and evidence tell you what you can’t have and when you must stop, miss out, change course, or simply go without. This is your life, and to access the life you truly love, it would make sense that we are each given an inner-force capable of overcoming anything—right? So, what is this force and how can we access it?

Imagine that inside of you is a Hero: a calm, powerful and intensely focused core of strength and certainty. When your Hero comes upon an excuse and lots of information telling you that you can’t have something or do something, what do you do? You’ve arrived at a giant wall, twenty-five feet tall, topped with razor wire, guarded by fierce tigers with their piercing eyes locked onto your every move, seemingly intent on keeping you from pursuing the already insurmountable goal of reaching your prize on the other side of this wall. How can you possibly proceed?

The first thing to do is to discover what’s on the other side of that wall for you—and determine whether it’s worth the climb! Is it a worthy adversary for your inner Hero? Is it getting that big contract with your dream client, or finally getting that six-figure job offer? Is it saving enough to buy that engagement ring for the woman of your dreams, paying for your kids to go to college, or having enough to retire on? Is it learning a new language or spending more time volunteering at the soup kitchen? Is it having the time with your husband, wife, or kids to enjoy life and maybe even have some fun, rather than putting all those moments off until someday and settling?

When you actually discover something worth pursuing, worth giving everything you have, you must light the spark of longing and frustration. You must become aware of your discontent rather than hide from it!

Maybe you’re not frustrated enough. Maybe a mundane, boring battle—to get by, make ends meet, and settle for the struggle—just feels like a normal existence for you and for those you love. Maybe you’re okay with settling.

Maybe you like going without and setting up camp just in sight of the wall you’ll never be fearless enough to climb. All the while, the dream of living your big life is just a distant dream fading away, rather than anything real that you could actually choose right now. Let’s face it. Within the safety of an average existence, your Hero will remain asleep, and the wall will become a distant part of the landscape, no more exciting to you than a long weekend or the end-of-day work bell at five o’clock.

If you’re frustrated now, even just a little, maybe it’s worth reading on. Isn’t it true that to summon the strength to overcome anything requires a clear vision of what life will be like once you’ve broken through to the other side? What will it feel like, smell like, and taste like to be living a life on your own terms and giving the amazing benefits of that life to those you care about most?

What currently stands between where you are now and what you’d love most? That’s the wall.

How bad do you want it? Is it a worthy adversary that makes the hair stand up on your neck? If it is, then we’re getting somewhere. Your Hero is listening now. He or she is starting to wake up.

We all face moments throughout our lives that will test us— not to keep us from succeeding or to divert us to do something easier, but rather to help us grow and focus on improving our weaknesses and cultivate our strengths. When we see every challenge as a test, it becomes a game worth pursuing, and that’s when things get exciting! Do you fear challenges? Most people do. Maybe now would be the ideal time to get excited when something doesn’t meet your expectations or when an obstacle falls into your way. Imagine that each test is part of a bigger one, and the real lesson is that the challenges are what give life juice—the excitement that keeps us engaged and growing. Then could you love the unexpected challenges as much as the wins, honoring them as yet another linchpin in honing the skills you need to thrive?

Life is a test. Excuses are what you create—consciously or unconsciously—that stop you from moving forward while pointing directly at the next challenge you most need to overcome to create a life you love. Welcome to the test.

Without the test, we will never step into our greatness. The people, experiences, and struggles—the moments of challenges, pain, suffering, doubt, and fear—are all part of the test. The test is our teacher. Without shining a light on the test, we will never work hard, prepare, take action, create results, evaluate them, or push ourselves to do what’s hard so life can be easy. It’s the great awakener, from the sleep of normalcy, safety, and shelter from the challenging experiences that try our very nature.

The test reveals our great Hero. The test is the light shining on us, exposing what grit, grace, growl, and guts we are made of, how we are called to give in this life. The test reveals the life we really desire most: a life lived to the fullest. An inspired life. An exciting life that demands that we engage our muscles and magic!

What if the very roadblocks and circumstances you now and always have believed to be in your way were never roadblocks at all but actually Launchpads? What if your situation is, in fact, exactly where you are supposed to be, and because of it, you will learn to use your senses and engage with, live, and create amazing progress and abundance, accessing inner and outer resources far beyond any powers you’ve ever imagined?

What if, without this moment and the culmination of your life experiences to date, you would never be able to engage with the true art of choosing every single action, thought, experience, and everything you would love? What if that which now seems impossible—due to the discomforts, struggles, and failures of the past—is only possible because of them?

Does that excite you? It should, because it turns the traditional view of roadblocks on its head!

As you become the Hero in your own life and commit to testing the lessons that you learn, make careful notes of the distinctions, inspirations, and actions you can directly apply in your own life. Then take the action and implement what you learn. When you do, your life results will give you the proof of the effectiveness of this process as the most exciting, freeing, easy, and minimalist approach to unleashing your own greatness and the results that are your birthright.

Get excited, because this life you live and all the joys and struggles in it is your Excuse-to-Launchpad laboratory. This is where the work you are doing—the health you feel, the freedom you enjoy, the time you invest in relationships, fun, and travel—is always what you choose, whether you know it and do something about it or not.

Throughout this book, I will guide you through the seven steps of the Excuse Removal Blueprint, where, at long last, you get to ask the most powerful questions you’ve ever asked in your life. You will activate your greatness so that you may become the shining, inspiring example of what is possible in an outstanding and unlimited