OH! Magazine - Australian Version July 2016 | Page 21

(Performance Coaching)
GREG
SELLAR

THREE HARMFUL
STATUS QUO MENTALITIES
Greg Sellar explores three mentalities that may be holding you back.
hen 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 you
realise that all your hopes, plans and
goals for the ‘future’ should ha ve been
achieved, or at least acted upon by now.
Pretty soon, you’re that parent who thinks
‘LOL’ means ‘love you lots’, and you’ve
just texted it to a good friend whose loved
one has passed away. Not cool.

W

If the status quo is the current standard
of the most popular way of doing, thinking
and feeling, then I think we should burn
it. Assimilation to the status quo is easy
because we want to fit in; we’re wired to
think if most people believe something, it
must be right, or if most people do
something, it must be the best way of
doing it. But it often isn’t – it’s just that
we haven’t considered the other options.
A friend referred to those stuck in the
status quo as ‘sheople’ (half people, half
sheep), as they relive ‘groundhog day’ in
the hopes of either winning the lottery or
having someone knock on their door to
change their life. It’s not going to happen.
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. After all, 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:

make the change, and the repercussions
for things not going 100 per cent to plan
will never be fatal. The time is now.

Mindset 1. If someone is challenging your
viewpoint, they’re wrong and you should
react in a hostile manner

Mindset 3. If someone doesn’t conform to
what is ‘normal’, they’re weird and/or
should be shunned

This comes from the mistaken thought
that there is a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way of
doing things. It leads to a population that
is unwilling to revise their views on just
about anything. The hostility is built out
of fear – fear of new things and of change.
The strategy to overcome this is to
properly listen, and to open up the
possibilities for yourself. What has the
other side got to say and are you listening
to them, or just hearing them with your
own viewpoint still front-of-mind?
Hearing is a sense, but listening is a skill.
Better listeners will have more chance of
seeing other paths to success.

Most people put ‘normal’ on a pedestal,
but what is that, exactly? ‘Normal’
doesn’t exist because as we know from
that saying ‘the map is not the territory’,
how we see the world and perceive the
stimulus our experience delivers to us, is
going to be different for every single one
of us. Therefore, if ‘normal’ is the goal,
then anything that violates it becomes
the enemy, and it’s a lot of the reason we
see people hanging onto old ideas that
lead to judgement, gossip and bullying. If
you can appreciate that everyone is
different and just because they don’t
conform to what you consider normal,
doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Maybe you have
outdated views and might be equally
abnormal to others? It’s swings and
roundabouts.

Mindset 2. You should do something that
you don’t enjoy now, so you can enjoy what
you do, later
It’s how we’ve operated for the last 150
years – get the job, work for 40 years so
you can retire and then spend your time
doing what you want. It results in people
working in jobs they hate (71 per cent of
people according to Forbes magazine,
2011). It starts with students majoring in
‘safe’ subjects they despise, because
they think that’s what is expected by
society or their parents. Long term, we
see people clinging to routine but it
leaves them feeling depressed and angry
because they’re afraid to do something
new. Don’t wait. If you like or want to do
something now, then do it. There won’t
be any magic sign or perfect time to

These status quo mentalities are familiar
to us all at some point in our lives. And if
they are the factors that stop us from
moving forward then we have to
acknowledge that they exist, and take
positive steps to change them – now. If
you’re not sure how to do that, drop me a
line and we can have a chat.

YOU CAN CONTACT GREG VIA:
Web: teamlifehack.com
Facebook: greg.sellar
Twitter: @gregsellar
Instagram: @gregsellar

( OH! MAGAZINE ) JULY 2016

21