You don't always travel by the highway in life where the road is well laid out, giving you a smooth ride. Sometimes, you do have to get into alleys and small roads where you find many potholes and bumps. However, you tend to manage all that well, until you come to a dead end. That is when you feel, this is a point of no return. But when you happen to gather enough courage and manage to find another highway, you may even be able to laugh at yourself in hindsight!
The normal tendency on such a sticky wicket is that we make excuses, whine, complain, or just retreat into a shell. Some typical dead-end situations you encounter in life are:
- Job Situations: The situation may be joblessness, job loss, or no growth in the current job.
- Relationships: It could be break in a current relationship, divorce, or widowhood.
- Business: Your business may not be making any progress, or may be running under loss.
In any of these situations, when you actually need a lot of energy and need to plan ahead and look after others, you feel royally stuck and powerless.
How To Do the "Turn-Around"?
- Evaluate Your Thought Patterns: If you try to evaluate your thought patterns carefully, you will find that most of them are negative thoughts, which needs a good "makeover." You may blame yourself for not working hard enough or you may feel sorry for yourself for being in this situation. Either way, it is not going to help you in your current situation. What has happened is over. No point brooding over it. Think of all your good achievements and convince yourself that you can pick up the threads from this point on and weave another good life for yourself.
- Quit Making Excuses: Excuses will not take you anywhere. Forget the "why's" of the situation and concentrate on the "how's" for moving on. It is always easy to find an excuse why you are not taking action, you need to make efforts to go out and find a better job for yourself or meet new people, whatever your situation is.
- Talk to Someone: When you are in a dead-end situation, the normal tendency is to retreat into a shell. This very action becomes counterproductive to your progress ahead. Talk about how you feel to someone you trust. For one, this will help you unburden the heaviness that you feel and you will feel much lighter. Secondly, that person may come out with 2 or 3 options for you to think about, which owing to your negative thought at the moment never passed your mind!
- Get Out of Your Comfort Zone: Try something new! There are certain activities or jobs that you label as "not for me." Unless you try out something new, you will never be able to tell whether you are good at it or not. If job is your concern, join for a new vocational course and try out that field. If failed relationship was your issue, join some club or sports, where you will be able to meet new people.
- Plan: Make a list of things that you need to do to help you get "unstuck" from your situation. Maybe like, "I will join for the next batch of a particular course....so after the course, I can land up in a better job." When the recession hit some companies, many employees who were laid off, utilized that time to get themselves a postgraduate degree or diploma, instead of brooding about the unfortunate turn of events.
Beware of These
There are some things, however, that you should stay away from at such times:
- Procrastination: When you are in such situations, the sadness and lethargy tend to make you lazy and makes you procrastinate about taking positive actions. One reason for this could be, after having undergone so much in the past, you are scared about the rejections that you assume could happen. Make an effort to avoid such self-limiting negative thoughts.
- Trying to be Perfect: You don't have to get it right all the time. What is important is to keep trying.
Dead-ends come in life for you to get a second chance to lead a more fruitful life than before. Create value with your life by doing something that adds value to the world. Be passionate about whatever you take up this time.
