Weekdays are for work, and so weekends are for feeling pen-sive.

After a particular good conversation over coffee with my bros and a heartfelt one on the ride back home, the topic of self-progress and stagnation came about.

It’s not a straightforward one about having no courage to go after your dreams, or choosing to back away from a challenge. It was a little more complex – one where stagnation is disguised in the format where you think you’re being strong.

People build up walls around themselves for various reasons. Many of them are circumstances unique to you, but often they revolve around the experiences of getting hurt, being left by a loved one in your younger years, or simply just feeling jaded by the lemons life has tossed you.

Over time, we treat these walls as our innate “strength” – the ability to learn the indications and patterns, so that you walk away faster, and fail (i.e. hurt) smaller. Some of us are even proud of it, myself included, sometimes.

When a method or solution is so well-learnt, it becomes an instinct. You leave when a matter hints that it could hurt; you run when words or attitudes trigger off a lousy memory. Basically your shut down- mechanism works a little like an on-off switch.

After all that’s said and done, and you’ve finally decided to sweep the dust off cover of the books you’ve shelved away, the only thing you’ve accomplished is Staying Stagnant. If you’re constantly relying on the same ol’ solution to solve all your problems that fall within the same category, then if you’re being real with yourself, there has simply been no progress.

Branding shutting down/running away/escaping from the situation as being strong is getting older by the day. You may say it’s a process of “letting go”, but letting go does involve a process of first trying other methods to fix things before dismissing it as a gone case, a lost cause, and pretending it’s something dead to you and your life.

What is that area in your life that has caused you to run away time and time again? What is that fear? There may be more than one, and that doesn’t really matter.

I believe that the moment you choose to deal with fears in manners other than running away, you turn them into challenges that can be overcomed with creativity and finesse. This in turn becomes a progress you can track, and an area in your life you can start improving upon.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that in the midst of making less people “dead” to you, you’re also making self-improvements to your the way you think, your health and way of life in general?

And, the first step is always to not shy away from self-awareness, and instead to address your fears head-on, so you know to capture them the moment they occur. That way you can start coming up with more innovative solutions in the future rather than relying on your instincts to do what’s comfortable once again.