Your Comfortable Web

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Many young people have stopped learning in the religious or spiritual dimensions of their lives long before they graduate from college. Some settle into rigid and unchanging political and economic views by the time they are twenty-five or thirty. By their mid-thirties most will have stopped acquiring new skills or new attitudes in any central aspect of their lives.

As we mature we progressively narrow the scope and variety of our lives. Of all the interests we might pursue, we settle on a few. Of all the people with whom we might associate, we select a small number. We become caught in a web of fixed relationships. We develop set ways of doing things. As the years go by we view our familiar surrounding with less and less freshness of perception. We no longer look with a wakeful, perceiving eye at the faces of people we see every day, nor at any other features of our everyday world.

That is why travel is a vivid experience for most of us. At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children.

It is not unusual to find that the major changes in life - marriage, a move to a new city, a new job, or a national emergency - reveal to us quite suddenly how much we have been imprisoned by the comfortable web we had woven around ourselves. Unlike the jailbird, we don't know that we have been imprisoned until after we have broken out.

John Gardner, Self-Renewal

Two things fill the mind

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Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily reflection is occupied with them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me. Neither of them need I seek and merely suspect as if shrouded in obscurity or rapture beyond my own horizon; I see them before me and connect them immediately with my existence. -Immanuel Kant (born April 22, 1724)

A growth mindset

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A growth mindset suggests that you can grow, expand, evolve, and change. Intelligence and capability are not fixed points but instead traits you cultivate. A growth mindset releases you from the expectation of being perfect. Failures and mistakes are not indicative of the limits of your intellect but rather tools that inform how you develop. A growth mindset is liberating, allowing you to find value, joy, and success in the process, regardless of the outcome. 

Cultivating a growth mindset can begin with shifting your inner dialogue from beliefs about your ability (a fixed mindset) to beliefs about your opportunities and needs (a growth mindset)—for example, from “I’m terrible at giving presentations” to “I need more practice presenting in front of others.” 

Similarly, “I’m not good enough to be promoted to supervisor” might become “I need some additional experience before I’ll be ready for promotion.” Simple restatements have a dramatic impact on what you believe about your own abilities. A fixed mindset often runs deep; it may take constant practice to reframe your default thoughts.   

Lisa Christensen, Jake Gittleson, and Matt Smith

Safe Solutions

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If your state of mind is coming from a place of fear and risk avoidance, then you will always settle for the safe solutions—the solutions already applied many times before. Sometimes, the path already taken is the best solution. But you should not follow the path automatically without first seeing it for what it really is. When you are open to possibilities, you may find that the common way is the best way for your particular case. However, this will be a choice you made not by habit, but by reflection and in the spirit of a fresh beginner with fresh eyes and a new perspective. 

Garr Reynolds, Presentation Zen

Diminishing our Pain

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People say to me, "Things in my life are pretty hard right now, but I have no right to complain—it’s not Auschwitz." This kind of comparison can lead us to minimize or diminish our own suffering. If we discount our pain, or punish ourselves for feeling lost or isolated or scared about the challenges in our lives, however insignificant these challenges may seem to someone else, then we’re still choosing to be victims. We’re judging ourselves. I don’t want you to hear my story and say, "My own suffering is less significant. " I want you to hear my story and say, "If she can do it, then so can I."

 Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger in her book The Choice

Self-Renewal & Motivation

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The self-renewing man is highly motivated and respects the sources of his own energy and motivation. He has the priceless quality of enthusiasm.  He knows how important it is to believe in what he is doing. 

He knows how important it is to pursue the things about which he has a deep conviction. Enthusiasm for the task to be accomplished lifts him out of the ruts of habit and customary procedure. Drive and conviction give him the courage to risk failure. (One of the reasons mature persons stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.) And not only does he respond to challenge, but he also sees the challenge where others fail to see it . . . 

John Gardner, Self-Renewal