ComplacencyWritten by Sue Dyson
If we do not change our direction, we will end up where we are headed. - Chinese proverbThe self-development market is inundated with tips, techniques and treasures on visualizing your success. Leaders in this field encourage us to picture a successful outcome to a performance, sales presentation , or difficult situation. They encourage us to feel success, see it clearly in our minds, over and over and over. This creates a comfort zone, a known reference point. When actual situation arises, one effortlessly steps into comfort zone, and voila! you are prepared to carry out your mission. There is a time and purpose for this technique. It's also important to not rely on it entirely. Consider for a moment, benefits of stepping away from this comfort zone. What?! Isn't comfort whole point? Well, yes and no. Comfort with a situation allows you to execute a task with relative ease, with little thinking of situation on your part. You've made task into an automatic response to a situation. There is a risk involved, however, in that automation and it's called complacency. Complacency is defined as "A feeling of contentment or self-satisfaction, especially when coupled with an unawareness of danger, trouble, or controversy." - The American HeritageŽ Dictionary of English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000. We become complacent when we are overly comfortable with a process, situation or even lifestyle. You may believe whole point of life is to seek comfort. It's not. It's to grow. You know, life? To live? Comfort is a settling in. To continue in growth is to inject a little dis-comfort into one's life. Move out of your comfort zone. Sound scary? All more reason to do it. We can become complacent in many areas of our lives. Relationships, work, health and well being, for example. In a marriage or significant union, it's well known that complacency makes for a stagnant relationship. In work, it makes for a dead end job or business which leads to discontent. With our health, physical problems can sneak up on us and hit us in back of head. Complacency in any one of these areas can lead to problems in others. We're in a big web of interconnectedness.
| | AssertivenessWritten by Sue Dyson
We hear it all time, we've heard it growing up. You need to be assertive in order to achieve your goals. How important is it, really, to be assertive in your life? It can't possibly be that critical, can it? Well, answers to these questions are 'very' and 'yes' and I'll tell you why.Have you ever been in a situation, where someone is doing something you don't like but you don't bother to communicate this to them? It may seem so much easier to say nothing and hold your feelings in. Or it may seem like too much energy to expend. Have you ever considered effect this decision may have on people involved? Are you aware of any feelings of resentment rising either immediately or later? I'll use an example situation of how this may play out in real life. Monica finally made time to simply sit down and do nothing. She'd been running around all day without a break. As soon as she became comfortable, her friend Suzy dropped by with her rambunctious kids. Normally, Monica would be thrilled to see her friend. Today, after some trying personal events, all she really wanted and needed was some quiet, alone time. Monica had three choices in this situation. She could be assertive and state her needs for time to herself. She could choose to remain consciously silent, that is, say nothing and observe her reactions, learning from them. Or she could choose to be unconsciously silent. And yes, making no choice is still a choice. The problem with last option, saying nothing and not examining your reaction for doing so, is resentment is bound to build within relationship. Unless you take care of energy this resentment creates it will always be there, buried deeper as time passes and this can have detrimental effects on our body, mind and spirit. Our thoughts are energy. If energy is not expressed, it becomes repressed. It has to go somewhere. In energetic terms, it goes inside and will seek some other way to manifest. It's a force of Nature. When enough repressed energy builds, you may eventually be subjected to dis-ease within your body. This is basically what disease and illness are in our bodies - blocked, unreleased energies.
|