Passively Waiting?

Surviving or Thriving? 

At first I was afraid, I was petrified.......sings Gloria Gaynor in 1978. She then suddenly changes her tune... oh not I, I will survive hey hey. Survival was Gloria’s goal...she started with the fear of loss and then somehow finds her inner strength and wills herself to keep going. She’s a survivor but I think there’s more. I have lived with both mindsets and I have to remind myself that one of them is reactive and the other proactive. I can’t speak for Gloria but from a growth mindset and perspective I’d say thriving is more what we want to strive for. 

There are times when survival must outweigh everything. If I don’t make it out of this week alive, then all my strategies for building purpose and meaning in my life, and in my role, won’t mean a whole lot. However, that’s not where most of us actually are and yet we’re being sucked into a survival mentality through fear and uncertainty about the future. Was the world or the future ever really certain? 

Here’s where I’ve watched some of my clients get tripped up. The pandemic hit...and then the news of the pandemic took over our thoughts and triggered so many fears. Fears that moved us into a survival mindset and in some ways killed our vision orientation and instead we started to believe the survival mindset when it told us we must hunker down, buy as much toilet paper and meat (good for those two industries!) as we can, and wait out the storm. Did you notice that? Wait...

Waiting can become a passive state which becomes more like paralyzation. There are times when waiting is a good and necessary strategy, but is right now (2020 - 2021) really one of those times economically speaking? Organizationally speaking? Entrepreneurially speaking? Personal developmentally speaking? Is surviving our best option? Or maybe, there’s another option. A better strategy. A more active stance. 

I’ve been in the development world for over 20 years. During the 2008 recession. The swine flu epidemic. Y2K...you get the idea. Certainly we all wanted to survive, yet there were some who stood up and said I want more. I want to come out stronger. Wiser. Healthier. Wealthier. Isn’t this more of the mentality that we aspire to when we’re not making decisions through the lens of fear and scarcity? How will we discover the good in the hard things if we simply get stuck in a waiting posture hoping things will get better? And what things are we waiting on? A better bottom line? More opportunities? A stronger market? A better financial year? More career stability? 

Be cognizant of being lured into stagnancy by uncertainty. We don’t have to wait on the world to “get it together” we can move forward in pursuit of what is meaningful and good. Don’t accept the counterfeit currency of passively waiting for things to rebound. We must rebound. We got hit hard...and then we got hit again. So now we adapt. We change strategy, we analyze what we have in ourselves that’s strong, that we can maximize and acknowledge where we must have support from others to keep moving forward...to keep pursuing what matters. 

Lets connect with other like minded folks who hold similar values and draw energy from one another to grieve, adapt and grow. Not going backwards, not waiting for some media goddess to give us the green light, but moving forward together in reality-based hope. We can have hard things and still grow and dream and achieve.