ARE YOU STAGNATING IN A SAFE HARBOUR?

 

 

Change is life. Stagnation is death. If you don't change, you die. It's that simple! It's that scary! And you will change when you are prepared to learn something new. Now this will not be easy every time, more so as you add years to your life. The ‘safe harbor of the known’ then becomes your sanctuary and you start feeling satisfied and contented. Contrary to what you were expecting though these two feelings – satisfied and contented are dangerous because this is what precipitates stagnation in life. After all, in order to reach these new lands, we must lose sight of the shore-even for just a little while. Dare to be a Columbus or a Vasco de Gama and explore the unknown. That takes guts and the alternative is always easy.

Thomas Szasz, the famous American psychiatrist writes “Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.”

Powerful words, truly transformational and that’s why I salute the brave thinkers among us. Remember how vociferously the surgeons doing cholecystectomy (gall bladder removal) and hernia repair by open technique objected to the introduction of laparoscopic surgery? Remember how they cautioned that we were unnecessarily trying to complicate simple surgeries? Where are those open surgery advocates and stalwarts today? In the pages of history, and may their souls rest in peace! The very act of learning something new disrupts the way you’ve always seen things-and the way you’ve always been. A fresh idea pushes you out of your comfort zone and threatens the very foundations you’ve built your view of the world on.

The problem is that refusing to learn and grow is the beginning of the end. Life is all about making tomorrow better than today. The progressive mind of a professional is obsessed with the idea of stepping into your next level of excellence with every passing hour. To cling to the thoughts and ways of performing that you’ve always known is to resign yourself to being average and mediocre. You are no more playing the game but being a mere spectator.

 

Stagnation in life:

Life is not a success-only journey. You are going to encounter road bumps and rumble strips along the way. Situations may overwhelm you momentarily but you’ve got to have the strength of character to get up and get back in the game. In this journey there are times when we grow and excel. We are endlessly driven and hyped up, motivated to get our goals. Then there are times when we stagnate. We feel uninspired and unmotivated. We keep procrastinating on our plans. More often than not, we get out of a rut only to get back into another one. Inaction is followed by stagnation. Stagnation is followed by pestilence and pestilence is followed by death. So well in time we must ask ourselves ‘what was always our biggest dream, and did we realize that dream during our life?’

 

Over the years I have realized that stagnation in life can have a variety of symptoms but they eventually fall in a pattern which is easily identifiable. I will try to enumerate them one by one:

1. You spend too much time doing things you don’t need to do: Spending time aimlessly in front of the television or your computer or phone, interacting with unknown people on social media are signs of time not spent in growth.
2. You complain too much:  Do you complain about your boss, your salary, or your noisy neighbors? If so, you probably don’t do anything but project negative energy into your environment, and negativity doesn’t help anything, it just makes you stuck.
3. You don’t feed your brain: If you are not learning something new every day you are stagnating. The same internet in which you are killing your precious time in social media can be used for self improvement. Thought provoking challenges help you expand your knowledge and improve your thinking, so don’t avoid them.
4. You aren’t inspired: Each of us has something we enjoy doing which adds to our life, and you have to rediscover what excites you and put more of it into your life. Otherwise going to work every morning, going home, watching television and going to bed, and not having passion for anything is a sure sign of stagnation. You only end up developing a deep sense of feeling that you are living under your potential.
5. You have too many negative conversations with yourself: Sometimes our thoughts can ruin our day. Henry Ford said, "Whether you think you can or you think you can’t - you're right," which means that if you tell yourself that you are too exhausted to make a difference in your life, you're right because that's what you decided.
6. You’re not planning for the future: If you don’t have a goal or a plan of some sort, you’re like a sailor on a boat sailing the sea without a sail expecting to get to a good place, but chances are that that won’t happen. You have to create a plan of action which will help you reach your safe haven - just like choosing a destination on a GPS.
7. You are procrastinating: You know your goals, you know you have to achieve them but every day you find a new excuse to postpone your efforts towards achieving your goals by spending time on useless and relatively unimportant matters.
8. You spend too much time with negative thinking people: These people are not friends if they do not inspire you. They are are pulling you down with them, not letting you fly. People like these are "energy vampires" because they draw the spirit of life from others and do not give anything positive in return. Avoid them like plague.
9. You are addicted to your smartphone: Though Steve Jobbs gave us loads of power of information in our pocket are these gadgets are getting very possessive about you? Is it causing you to miss out on the meaningful entertainment and intimate relationship with the people you love, your friends and your family? Then surely it is affecting your progress in life.
10. You spend money on things that don’t matter: Buying things you do not need, with money you do not have, to impress people who do not matter is a sure sign that you have stopped growing. A distinction between ‘need’ and ‘want’ is essential and there is a difference between acquisition and achievement. After all there is no achievement in buying a gold medal from a jeweler!
11. You don’t get enough sleep: If you're awake till the early hours doing chores, you’re probably wasting your free time during the day on things that are not necessary.
12. You are not taking care of your body: Your body is the vehicle that drives your soul, and you must help it stay healthy by eating a balanced, healthy diet and exercising, not just for weight loss, but to maintain its strength. It will affect you mentally and change your attitude toward life. Show me a lazy, obese, couch potato who lives on Coke and chips and I will show you a perfect example of stagnation of life!
13. You don’t step out of your comfort zone: You are scared of taking risks in life. That is all right, no one is asking you to be reckless but life demands calculated risks from time to time in order to progress. A change in job, or city, or investments should not be out of bounds at any stage of life. Many times, the thought of fear itself is greater than what it is we fear.
14. You don’t love your life: Success and happiness come hand in hand. Do you feel happy? If not, you may need to make a significant difference in your life. Material success and happiness are two very different things otherwise the Monk wouldn’t have sold his Ferrari! Life should excite you and you must enjoy it to its fullest! 

You can change your life, but first, you have to get rid of the little voice in your head telling you it's impossible. Most of the times the pattern of thoughts in our heads become our biggest obstacle. So start by making a change in the way you think. Change your way of thinking and speaking and gradually the way you perceive and experience life will change as well.

Stagnation in career:

Swami Vivekananda a famous Indian scholar and spiritual leader once said: “Arise, awake and stop not, till the goal is achieved.”  In order to reach your goals, you first need to know what they are. Careers are not made overnight. It requires rigorous screening through ranks of education, obstacles of college, never-ending hours of desk work and many sacrifices. The worst part is even when you have crossed all these hurdles there is no surety that where you are headed is what you really wanted in your life. Stagnation is self-abdication and nothing can be worse.

Many working professionals are unhappy with their career for one reason or the other. They often lack of awareness about the concept of a stagnant career. Many professionals do not even realize that their career has become stagnant. Conversely growing as professional, opening doors to new opportunities, moving up the management ladder are all but signs of a dynamic career.

Stagnation comes because there isn't anything that excites you enough to take action. If you don't have a habit of setting goals, and instead just leave yourself to daily mundane, it's not surprising you are experiencing stagnation. Curiosity is a worthwhile virtue than certainty. While the former leads to grow, the latter muzzles your growth and results in stagnation. The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

Here are a few Stagnation Signs in a professional:

• “We’ve always done it that way” — we don’t challenge our assumptions and frequently reflect on how we should do things now.
• “I am too old to change” — this is a dangerous trait. It’s also about dying before one’s time by living halfheartedly the time one has left. If you refuse to change, you refuse to live in the professional world. Change with time and you will create and re-create yourself endlessly.
• Losing our child-like curiosity — our sense of wonder and discovery is replaced with cynicism and apathy — “been there, done that, what else is new?” The Spanish painter and sculptor, Pablo Picasso, has been called the greatest artist of the 20th century. He once observed, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”
• Learning strictly through our own experience — it’s often better to borrow experience than to just learn from our own. Not only can that be less painful, it’s much faster. Books, podcasts, seminars, mentoring, networking, group problem solving and the like are some of the ways we can learn from other people’s experience.
• Creatures of habit — repeating what we know prevents us from learning the new. Even our thinking can fall victim to repeating worn out clichés, platitudes, and dogma.
• Having all the answers — mediocre people have an answer for everything and are astonished at nothing. They always want to have the air of knowing better than you what you are going to tell them. You can ignore them, they are fossils of yesterday and will never become the champions of tomorrow.
• Satisfied and complacent — only a mediocre person is always at his or her best. If I am getting very comfortable with my expertise and skill levels, I am playing in a junior league. I am not stretching and challenging myself enough. My comfort zone is fossilizing into a complacency zone.
• Fearing to attempt — we know that the turtle only makes progress by sticking his head out. Yet we sit and dream about what we’re going to do someday. If we don’t take steady steps toward our dreams, the walls around our complacency zone get ever higher and thicker.
• Unsure about the target — our growth and development should be taking us somewhere. If we don’t know where we want to go, what we stand for, or why we’re here, any experience and learning path will do. We just wander around and hope for the best.

 

Getting old and growing old

There’s a world of difference between getting old and growing old. With age can come wisdom, but too often age comes alone. Age to the stagnant is winter, but to an achiever it is harvest time. Not all experience is equal. Experience isn’t what happens to us, it’s what we do with what happens to us. There’s a major difference between growth experiences and stagnating experiences. Just because we’ve shown up year after year and put in the time, doesn’t mean we’ve gained by the experience. We may just be going through the motions, like taking the same route day after day; soon we’re numbed to the passing landscape. We’re in a rut.

Just as stagnant water is unhealthy, dirty and foul smelling a stagnant life is no better. The carving to know something new, the desire to do something not yet tried, the need to reinvent oneself all over again, these are the signs of life and symptoms of progress. Absence of these signs is stagnation, a stage closest to death.