5 THINGS TO EXPOSE FAKE CONTENTMENT TO ACTIVELY PURSUE WHAT YOU REALLY WANT

We understand there are constant barriers to achieving what we want, whether it involves personal endeavors, family, profession, or business.  One barrier commonly overlooked is what I refer to as “fake contentment”. It can easily be mistaken for gratitude and used to give the appearance of things being okay, even if they aren’t. Allowing “fake contentment” to persist will inevitably delay or ruin our ability to be successful. Therefore, exposing when it’s happening is critical if you want to create a path to productivity. Besides uncovering the impediments of contentment which promote a false sense of achievement, we will explore ways to recognize when they are present and how to move beyond them.

• • Focus
    • • Monitor your focus. If we do not give this key factor attention, you could easily become distracted or worst stagnation sets in. To feel better about a negative plight you find yourself in, it’s easy to look for ways to justify your current state by emulating happiness. This is an indicator that you are faking being pleased with your current situation. You show up for others with a smile, but you’re hiding inward discontent and emptiness. If this is happening, redirect your attention and focus on your goal. Redirection is only part of the equation; you must commit to managing and monitoring your focus. A few tips to help with this include engaging in mindful brain exercises, improving sleep, adding meditation, increasing physical activity, and listening to inspiring music. 

• • Velocity
    • • You must find means to measure your velocity. Without a method to pace and rate the effectiveness of your new idea, project, or business, you may spin your wheels, working hard, and going nowhere fast. If you avoid evaluating or assessing your progress, it may show that you are creating contentment security pockets. It’s an easy and common way for you to excuse and ignore inactivity. You could be deliberately or unconsciously forming a habit that does not serve you well. So, to increase your chance of success and reduce negative tendencies, you need to monitor your speed and quantity while rating the quality of your movements. A review of your accomplishments would include whether your benchmarks were accomplished, and if they were met according to your timeline with the value you had outlined to deliver. As you think about velocity, you are considering your destination or location as it relates to your starting position. Therefore, your distance measures your stretch or the space between where you are, where you are going, and where you want to arrive. Acceleration influences the rate at which you are moving forward to achieve your goals. No movement or a slowdown in moving forward with your plans may be a sign that it has compromised your acceleration, especially if the reduction was not planned. It is important to take action to determine what distractions or barriers have emerged. Last, your direction encompasses your roadmap, which is crucial to your endeavor. Destination, distance, acceleration, and distance are all relative to you to deliver value to your clients, customers, or audience.

• • Pleasure
    • • Chasing things that only bring you pleasure at the expense of real progress or true accomplishments places you on the path to false contentment. Challenge the temptation of your inner voice, which feeds the thought of “well, things could be worst” especially when it’s being used to mask deep-seated fear. Instead of continuing to feed the belief that you must keep smiling and giving an appearance of everything is okay, you allow yourself to deal with the reality of your real situation. You can empower yourself to give voice to what’s truly happening, so we can address it. If fear is the issue, acknowledge its presence so you can move forward to overcome it. This includes not trying to do it alone, practicing self-care, abandoning all notions of perfection, and realizing that the familiar axion “no man (person) is an island” is true because genuine success incorporates others.

• • Complacency
    • • While it should excite you about your success, you must guard against complacency. Undeserved self-content or misplaced self-satisfaction is dangerous when it seeps in because it fosters an illusion of success. Complacency may be creeping in if you become disengaged, there is a loss of passion and disinterest in opportunities for advancement, or you are making more mistakes. Complacency’s insidious nature is to create a spirit of timidity. You worry about what others are thinking about you and have negative feelings about yourself. You should keep learning, take calculated risks, be clear about what you want and ask for it, and be prepared to have difficult conversations when needed, which will counter complacency tendencies.  

• • Dreams
    • • Another indicator of false contentment is if you constantly think about and talk about your dreams, but there is little to no real effort to examine their validity or develop a strategy to achieve them. If you talk about your dreams incessantly, however, when pressed for details, you can’t get beyond your elevator speech, you’re in the contentment phase. How do you change your narrative from dreaming to doing? What are the next steps? If this is something that you have been working on for a while, identifying and engaging a coach may be a good place to start. Otherwise, begin with clearly outlining your goals, refer to them daily, develop a plan to achieve your goals, invest in specialized knowledge and resources needed to succeed, and incorporate an accountability.