Your Complacency Could Be Your Downfall

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is generally understood as meaning “don’t try to improve a system that already works well enough”. The popularisation of the adage is attributed to Thomas Bertram Lance, a former director of the Office of Management and Budget in former US president Jimmy Carter’s government in 1977. 

In its original context, the adage spoke to minimising the effect of impaired judgment. It was initially intended to refer to cutting through the ineffective panicked action often embodied during chaos, crisis, or conflict to become effective. Imagine the contrasting images of the frantic efforts undertaken by someone who is drowning and doesn’t know how to swim versus a confident swimmer in rough waters.

As an engaged human being, it’s easy to become so absorbed in putting out fires that the notion of sustainable evolution becomes sidelined. This expresses in leaders, entrepreneurs and professionals as a tendency to focus on whatever is critical and lose sight of what is essential. This sort of orientation is implicitly complacent because you have to be cavalier toward long-term threats and sustainable evolution to narrow your focus to whatever crisis demands your attention in the moment. The danger is that this lifestyle can become addictive for high-performers because your dopamine and endogenous opioid system give you a hit for completing another task and then ultimately surviving another day, week or year. Another complicating factor may be this sort of lifestyle bringing you other rewards, like career or business success. This only deepens its seduction.

But the concept of routine maintenance and replacement of parts in cars, boats and planes is an excellent example of why you shouldn’t wait until something breaks before acting. 

Moreover, just because something isn’t broken doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. 

The same is true for you. What drives your transformation? Do you wait until a catastrophic failure, or are you more proactive?

Increasing your emotional intelligence proactively is about not needing to wait until you have had a difficult conversation badly before exploring how best to have them. Nor is it living your life on a stress-and-release cycle to manage your poorly framed work-life balance until you crash and burn out. It’s about adopting an orientation toward life that ingrains sustainable evolution as a principle. You already know that climbing to heights of self-knowledge or achievement without being open to continued learning is a recipe for disaster. At best, you become outdated; at worst, you miss a critical insight or seed your own personal or professional downfall. Cultivating your emotional intelligence as a lifestyle choice should become as second nature as regular exercise; both are essential to a meaningful and long-lived life. It also just so happens that improving your emotional intelligence raises your performance to become the most effective version of yourself.

We need to share two final points to clarify our position:

1.     Being open to exploring your inner universe to embody sustainable evolution is not the same as being motivated by a sense of internal criticism or Imposter Syndrome. Even if your actions appear on the outside, at least, to be identical. The former will build capacity and resilience whilst the latter is attempting to feed a hungry ghost unless that work is performed in earnest.

2.     We’re not suggesting that reacting to chaos, crisis, or conflict is categorically wrong. The point is that adopting a responsive attitude to chaos, crisis, and conflict as part of your posture toward sustainable evolution negates the seduction of complacency. Reaching out for help when a situation explodes or when you’re out of your depth is an act of courage.