Is contentment a good thing or a bad thing?

Is it possible for contentment to kill our hunger for greater things?

Is it possible for it to stop us from reaching our fullest potential?

The old adage says – if your organization is not growing it’s already dying. What about us?

What about when our personal dreams, life vision or vision for our organization, stops, and gets buried in an endless lifelong pit of disappointments, failures, commitments, and busyness?

What about when all those things, put us in a kind of a daily suspended animation, where much of who we truly are, our authentic powerful selves, stops? Consequently, we merely coast through life, leading our families, our organization, that which we have been given to lead, nowhere in particular. We revert to just getting by, being satisfied with the comfortable, the predictable, and the familiar. It can feel good, a certain sense of contentment of what we have and what we are achieving sets in. The bigger dreams and visions we had can fade into the background of what we rationalize is ‘reality’. We become content with ‘our lot’.

The joy of a family, a measure of success and the feeling of safety, a life without risks, feels ok. You could even go so far in saying it feels good.

But, what if you’ve settled? What if your impact was meant to be more? What if your impact on the world, has potential way beyond where you are today? What if those dreams, those ideas and that vision that you had some time ago, was and still is, your special God-ordained assignment for your time on earth?

Could your contentment and comfort be the very thing that is holding you back from being fully all you were created to be?

Maybe you don’t feel so content, but the pattern of your life has become so established that you can’t imagine changing it to enable you to pursue those things that used to make your heart sing.

Maybe you are inspired by reading autobiographies of great leaders that changed history and have left a legacy long after their time.  What if you were born for similar greatness?

Here’s a quick litmus test to test whether contentment is holding you back.

Note how many ‘yeses’ you clock up. How many statements can you relate to?

• You live for your weekends, or holidays.
• The last season when you felt 120% alive was a very long time ago.
• You don’t have a 20 year vision for your business/organization,
• You don’t have a 20 year vision for your life.
• You spend the majority of the time doing things that you don’t enjoy or that don’t bring you fulfillment.
• You work harder on pursuing other people’s dreams than your own.
• You feel like you have ‘sacrificed’ everything for your kids, spouse, employees, parents etc.
• You can’t link what you spend the majority of your time doing now with where you ideally would like to be.

So how did you do? Any yeses? How many statements rang true? Are you in a prison of contentment, which is stopping you from pursuing the more? I write as an expert, as a while ago, I would have said yes to every one of those statements above.

Do you want to break free?

Here are some tips to break out and start living towards your fullest potential:-

1. Start by being honest with yourself – Do an emotional inventory. On a piece of paper, draw a line down the center vertically. On one side write down a list of positive emotions you feel about your life. On the other write down a list of negative.
2. Awaken the dreamer in you – You can’t achieve something that you can’t even envision. Start really simply by writing a list of dreams. Check out our dream start kit in resources. Allow yourself to dream about finances, home, relationships, work anything and everything. I challenge people to come up with an initial 100 dreams. Try it!
3. Choose to believe all things are possible – Make positive declarations to shift your current mindsets.
4. Find a champion – Find someone that will encourage you and believe in you. Tell them your dreams. Start to imagine and strategize with them how you can start to pursue some of these dreams. Decide which ones are for this season and which ones for longer term.

Do this and you’ll start to feel alive again. It’s an energizing, invigorating, exciting and challenging journey.

Where the journey will take you, right now you can’t even imagine. Enjoy!