CEC ARTICLE
MINDSET COACHING :
LET ’ S BURN THE STATUS QUO MENTALITY
By recognising three harmful mentalities that can keep you or your clients stuck in a rut , you can take positive steps to change your future .
WORDS : GREG SELLAR
I f you ’ re not moving forwards , you ’ re moving backwards . This is true because the world around you stops for no one , and that pace of change is getting faster and faster .
When one year looks and feels the same as the previous , then you can safely say you ’ re in the status quo . As we delude ourselves that life is ‘ comfortable ’, years go by before we realise that all our hopes , plans and goals for the ‘ future ’ should have been achieved , or at least acted upon by now .
If the status quo is the current standard of the most popular way of doing , thinking and feeling , then I ’ m up for burning it . It is the root of all evil . Assimilation to the status quo is easy because we want to fit in . We ’ re wired to think that if most people believe something , it must be right , or if most people do something , it must be the best way of doing it .
A friend refers to those stuck in the status quo as ‘ sheople ’ ( half people , half sheep ), as they endlessly re-live Groundhog Day in the hope of either winning the lottery or someone knocking on their door to change their life . It ’ s not happening . Ronald Reagan once summed it up by saying ‘ Status quo , you know , is Latin for ‘ the mess we ’ re in ’’.
Too much time spent chasing or living in the status quo results in a fixed mindset where , because of our conditioning , we can ’ t recognise that there are many pathways to success outside of traditional thinking . The problem is the enormous amount of people who want things to stay the same . The status quo wouldn ’ t be the status quo if most people didn ’ t support it .
According to the website refinethemind . com , there are three harmful status quo mentalities , any of which will see you wishing you were somewhere else , doing something else with someone else :
18 | NETWORK SPRING 2016