WE ALL ARE A BUNCH OF FROGS!!
Remind yourself that you are too smart to be complacent about a steadily deteriorating situation.
You’ve no doubt heard the story of the frog in boiling water. If you drop a frog into boiling water, it immediately jumps out (or so the story goes). However, if you put a frog in a pot of room-temperature water, and then bring the water to a boil very, very slowly, the frog will stay in the water until it dies. It’s an odd experiment that I have no intention of testing in my kitchen, but it’s an apt metaphor for how people sometimes deal with slowly deteriorating situations.
When we are confronted with an abrupt negative change, we tend to react immediately and decisively. Coming in contact with a flame will cause us to pull away instantly to avoid getting burned. We don’t think about it; we just react. Yet we will sit in the sun for hours and get badly burned. We know full well that we’re getting burned, but we tend to sit there anyway, because there is no instantaneous sensation to trigger a decision to get out of harm’s way.
It’s this absence of decision triggers that causes people to miss opportunities or to get into trouble that could have been avoided. Fortunately, being smarter than frogs, we have the ability to create decision triggers for our own good. If we’re sunbathing, for example, we might place an alarm clock deliberately out of reach and set it to go off every half hour. When it goes off, we have to get up, go over to it, and turn it off. This triggers a decision: “Should I expose myself to another half hour of sun, or have I had enough?” Without the clock, deliberately placed at an inconvenient distance and annoying us every 30 minutes, we are likely to keep telling ourselves, “Just a few minutes more,” and then a few minutes more after that, and so on, until it’s too late. The “time to get out of the sun” decision trigger arrives the following morning when we turn over in bed and wince in pain. By then, it’s too late to avoid the trouble.
The frog-in-boiling-water syndrome, as I like to call it, can arise in other, more serious, situations throughout our lives where we willfully ignore an increasingly dangerous situation, telling ourselves that we’ll do something about it “soon.”
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