I learned a new term in a meeting recently, and I have not shut up about it since.
“Navel gazing.”
First of all, 10/10 phrase. No notes. It sounds like something your grandmother would say right before telling you to straighten up and stop making everything about yourself. It also feels vaguely medical and vaguely Victorian, like someone should be reclining on a fainting couch while a man in a waistcoat murmurs, “Yes, yes… acute navel gazing.”
But what it means is even better.
Navel gazing, for the uninitiated, is what happens when we become so focused on ourselves, our feelings, our internal processes, our own experience of a thing, that we completely lose sight of anyone else. It’s excessive self-focus disguised as thoughtfulness. Introspection with no exit ramp.
It’s when an individual, a team, or an entire organization becomes so inward-looking that they stop asking the most basic external questions:
Who is this actually for?
Who does this affect?
Are we solving a real problem or just processing our own emotions about it?
Instead, the conversation loops. And loops. And loops. Feelings about feelings. Reactions to reactions. Strategy decks about strategy decks. It’s introspection without traction. Reflection with no next step.
If you’ve ever left a meeting and thought, “Wow, we really talked a lot and somehow decided nothing,” congratulations. You have witnessed navel gazing in its natural habitat.
It often starts innocently. Someone says, “Let’s talk about how this feels.” Great. Love feelings. Big fan. But then we keep talking. And talking. And talking. About the talking. And then someone suggests we need a follow-up meeting to process the feelings raised in this meeting, and suddenly you’re trapped in a conversational Inception where the only exit is the calendar invite.
Picture a group of fully employed adults metaphorically bent forward, staring at their own belly buttons, nodding thoughtfully. There are shared documents. There is a parking lot for ideas that no one ever revisits. Someone says, “Let’s sit with this,” and I swear a scented candle appears out of nowhere.
This is navel gazing.
The wild part is that it feels productive. There are big words. There is emotional intelligence. There is “alignment.” Everyone leaves feeling vaguely tired but also smug, like we accomplished something deeply important even though nothing has changed.
And listen. This is not a post about bad people. Navel gazing is a good-intentions problem. It happens in thoughtful spaces. Caring spaces. Places where people really, really want to do the right thing. When your heart is in the right place, it’s easy to confuse reflection with progress. Which is exactly why it’s so sneaky.
I say this as someone who has absolutely participated in it. I am not typing this from a moral high ground. I am typing this from the folding chair in the circle.
“Hi! My name is Rachel and I am a navel gazer.”
In fact, let me tell you about the moment this behavior burned itself permanently into my marriage vocabulary.
Years ago, my husband and I volunteered to serve on a leadership team for a local nonprofit that worked with young adults. We were excited. Hopeful. Ready to roll up our sleeves. We were told this particular meeting would be a big one. A brainstorming session about how to be more effective, how to improve outreach in the community, how to get more people to show up, and how to make our gatherings as impactful as possible.
Big goals. Big energy. We carved out time. We showed up ready to contribute.
Friends, that meeting lasted three hours.
Three hours of circling. Three hours of talking about talking. Three hours of deep concern and earnest reflection and absolutely no traction. We covered vision. And feelings. And hypothetical barriers. And the concept of engagement. And the experience of attendance. And the meta-experience of how we felt about engagement.
At the end of those three hours, after what felt like an Olympic-level endurance event in patience, the one and only decision that emerged was this:
We should move the registration table into the hallway instead of inside the door.
That was it. That was the takeaway. That was the fruit of our collective labor.
To this day, when my husband John and I find ourselves in a conversation that is circling the drain or disappearing into navel gazing territory, one of us will lean over and quietly say, “Well, maybe we should just move the table into the hallway.”
It is our shorthand. Our code phrase. Our way of saying, “We are doing the thing again.”
And honestly? If you’ve lived through something like that, you know exactly why that phrase has survived.
The danger isn’t self-awareness. Self-awareness is good. Necessary. Healthy. The danger is when self-awareness never looks up.
At some point, reflection that doesn’t lead to action becomes a form of avoidance. We stay inward because outward requires decisions. Decisions require risk. Risk means someone might disagree. Or be uncomfortable. Or think we got it wrong.
So instead, we keep talking. About ourselves. About our process. About how hard it is to decide. Surely if we talk about it one more time, clarity will magically descend from the ceiling.
It won’t.
Navel gazing is what happens when no one is willing to be brave enough to redirect. Everyone senses it, but no one wants to be the one to say it. So the conversation keeps circling, like a screensaver from 1999 bouncing off the edges of the monitor.
And here’s the quiet truth I keep coming back to. Organizations don’t become navel-gazing by accident. Cultures drift inward when external purpose gets fuzzy. When mission statements live on walls instead of in decisions. When serving people becomes secondary to protecting feelings.
That doesn’t make anyone a villain. It makes them human.
But humans need reminders.
Sometimes the most loving thing you can do in a room is interrupt the spiral. Not rudely. Not arrogantly. Just clearly.
This is where a sentence dropped into my brain and refused to leave:
Curious people notice patterns. Wise people name them. Brave people redirect them.
That’s the whole thing right there. That’s where the real progress is.
Curiosity is noticing. It’s that quiet inner voice saying, “Huh. We’ve been here before.” It’s realizing this meeting feels exactly like the last meeting, which felt exactly like the meeting before that, which somehow all ended with, “Let’s revisit this next quarter.”
Curious people don’t blow up the meeting. They don’t flip the table, even though they briefly consider it. They watch. They connect dots. They clock the repetition.
Wisdom is naming it. This is an art form. Naming the pattern without naming a villain. Saying, “I’m noticing we’re spending a lot of time focused on how this impacts us internally,” instead of, “We are eating our own emotional tail.”
Same message. Different outcome.
And then there’s bravery.
Bravery costs something. It can cost comfort. It can cost being liked in the moment. It can cost the illusion of harmony. But it’s also the only thing that changes the trajectory.
Bravery is redirection. It’s the moment you lift everyone’s gaze up from their metaphorical belly buttons and say something like, “Can we zoom out and talk about who this actually affects?” Or, “What decision would move this forward?” Or the boldest phrase of all, “What are we actually doing about this?”
Cue the silence. Someone clears their throat. Someone suddenly needs water.
Here’s where my Xennial energy really shines, because we are the generation raised on rotary phones and dial-up internet. We know what inefficiency looks like. We waited three minutes for a webpage to load only for it to fail, and we still persevered. We do not have unlimited patience for meetings that could have been an email that still wouldn’t have helped.
We want progress. Even messy progress. Especially messy progress.
If you find yourself frustrated in spaces like this, here’s my gentle encouragement. Your irritation might actually be information. You might be the curious one who’s noticing the pattern. You might be the wise one who can name it. You might even be the brave one who can redirect it.
And if you’re the one who realizes, with a small wince, that you’ve been doing some navel gazing yourself, welcome to the club. We have jackets. They’re probably fleece. We meet on Zoom.
The goal isn’t to stop reflecting. The goal is to lift our eyes long enough to remember why we gathered in the first place.
Curiosity notices. Wisdom names. Bravery redirects.
And if that becomes the vibe of your next meeting, you might just save everyone an hour, a follow-up calendar invite, and the organizational equivalent of moving the table into the hallway.
Rachel L. Richard is a small-town farm girl turned suburbanite, a delightfully irreverent optimist, Mrs & Mama, floppy dog ear scratcher, lifelong learner, channel surfer, wanderer, believer, occasional creative, out-of-practice musician, cupcake addict, book devourer, and lover of all people.
Leave a Reply