From yourself—“inner rot” and “outer collapse”

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(a)  No dream.  “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”  It all begins with a dream, and it dies for lack of one.  Perhaps the biggest problem facing you is this one.  Have a dream and you have a destination; if you don’t, you are merely “treading water”.  It is the dream that inspires you onwards when you are enveloped in dismal circumstances.
(b)  Confusion over goals.  If you don’t know what it is you want, you have a problem.  First, look under the exterior goals and examine the interior motivations.  Perhaps they are flawed, misdirected, or incomplete; if so, they will adversely affect your goals—and your production.  Production does not exist in a vacuum. If your motivations and goals say different things and go in different directions, you are a divided person: you cannot stand. 
(c)  Unsure where to begin.  You can’t be blamed for this one.  The task is huge, the final destination is many horizons away, and as in another journey, the first “wicket gate” is hard to find.  There are also many people telling you where they think you should begin.  At this point, beware of “false starts” in your English learning; they can be very disillusioning. 
(d)  No feedback from colleagues.  If no one tells you how you are doing, it is as if you are in a thick fog.  Do they even care?  Why won’t they help?  They surround you like silent ships, giving no indications of their intent, no directions, no comfort.  All you can hear is the uncertain thump of the sea against your bow-plates.  The long journey you have embarked on is lonely and cold. 
(e)  Few people care.  At times, perhaps much of the time, you will feel that nobody cares.  Remember, the people with great ideas must often walk alone for a season. 
(f)  Worries about your reputation.  If you have ulcers to plague you while you are on your journey, then this is it.  This problem shuts down many a dreamer, because they choose reputation over destiny.  Bad mistake! 
(g)  Worries about income, rent, food.  Obviously we must eat, but to worry about these things a lot is a running sore which will drain us and make us unproductive—we will bear no fruit at the end of the day. 
(h)  Fatigue.  For those who want to study English after their day’s work, fatigue is a constant enemy.  Usually, the demands of work are not what you had in mind—even if your job involves English in some way.  What you studied in college may have no bearing on your work, and your work may have no bearing on your dream.  All you have, you think, are the hours between supper and bedtime—and you are tired. 
(i)  Despair.  The “black dog” of despair is always waiting to join you; he often comes with fatigue, and he wants you to follow him forever.  This is a constant danger. 
(j)  No plan.  Once again, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.”  If you have no plan, you will get lost, bogged down, and operate without any direction.  Worse still, if you have no plan, other people may try to “feed” you their plan. 
(k)  No interest in English outside of job.  Work is draining, and life in general seems like an uphill struggle.  After a while, you learn to master the demands of English your job requires of you.  Now you are good!  You can speak English well on the job with confidence.  Either subtly or intentionally, you move no further; your “job-related English” becomes a fortress, you do not venture outside, and you begin to die by way of “fossilization”.  Besides, English is “boring” and not a part of your “real life” outside of work.  Let me play, right? 
(l)  Remain in your job because there is nowhere else to go.  Thousands of middle-aged English teachers—as well as others—are in this situation.  You still hold your job, but every day your fortress is becoming calcified, your house infested with termites, your career riddled with occupational cancer.  Under these conditions, when you are looking in and not venturing out, it is very hard to study English, if not impossible. 
(m)  Lose interest in English.  After a while, you may lose interest in the English language.  Perhaps the English you now have has been successful in winning the prizes of life you wanted when you were a college student.  “Why do I need to study more English?  I have what I want.”  (This is why my Chinese studies have died out.  I wanted to travel and to “survive” in China; I have “been there, done that”, and now I want to move on.  Fluency in Chinese has no meaning for me…well it never was my goal.)  The darker, more tragic side of this phenomenon is when you lose interest in English for the opposite reason—it did not achieve your goals!  Rather than give up because your stomach is full and you are bored, you quit because you are disillusioned and your heart has been broken.  Many people make this protracted discovery every year, and I believe that many more will follow them. 
(n)  “Why bother?”  The collapse of motivation.  All of the above, as well as others I have missed, have one goal in common—the destruction of your desires, your dreams, your motivation to study English.  In the end, you want to say, “Why bother?”  Then it is all but impossible to study English effectively. 
(o)  Burnout—collapse of career.  I wish to end this section from the perspective of the teacher of English—many of you, and me.  First: “Burnout”, as an occupational/psychological problem has been discussed in other books/articles.  Those people in the “helping professions”—doctors, nurses, social workers, parents (yes!), and teachers—all reach a point where they “lose it”.  Creativity, care, concern for others, compassion and competence all fall away, and these people are no longer what they used to be.  They suffer fatigue, weariness, exhaustion, and apathy in all domains of their being—I am not referring to mere “Monday morning blues”, here.  Burnout has different stages of severity, along with different types of treatment for each stage of severity.  You should look in the right sources for the correct treatment, but broadly speaking, it involves some form of change in your life, something new, refreshing and stimulating—in a sense, the opposite of those factors which brought you to the point of burnout.  Second: many of the problems we discussed in this section on “inner problems” can contribute to burnout.  One of the end results is the choice to give up one’s English studies.  It can be seen that the labor of studying English is as much an “inner struggle” of the spirit, as an “outer war” in the confines of society and our social responsibilities.