The 1 Way You're Sabotaging Your Contentment in Life

We all fail. I'm not talking about the inevitable life failures that happen. I'm talking about the fact that we tell ourselves that we fail, all the time. And that is the one way we sabotage our contentment in life.

Don't think you do this? Sounds ludicrous, right-- why would you tell yourself you fail, all the time?

Have you guys thought any of these things, even just this morning?

"Shouldn't have stayed up watching Netflix, now I only got 6 hours of sleep."
"Forgot to prep my breakfast last night- there goes my healthy eating plan."
"Hit snooze and missed my yoga class. How do those people do it every day?"
"I really need to get on my workout routine. I just don't have time."

Pretty common, I'd say. I sure hear it all-- and I am totally guilty of doing the same!

Through my favorite Brené Brown, I found this insightful quote by Lynne Twist:

"For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is, "I didn't get enough sleep." The next one is, "I don't have enough time." Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it.

We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of... Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something.

And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to the reverie of lack...

This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life."

It's hard to be happy or satisfied when you're constantly telling yourself that you are essentially failing left and right. Not enough sleep, missed workout, ate unhealthily, don't make enough money, want to buy that expensive thing, want to pick up on that hobby or passion project. We live in a culture that encourages us to constantly be in a state of "want." Wanting pretty things, expensive toys, likes on social media, to be a globetrotter, svelte figures, etc. But by assigning our satisfaction to and thinking that you'll be happy when you reach a certain number on the scale, have 100k Instagram followers, more expensive clothes, and the like... it's really difficult to find contentment when you're always chasing. 

This is not to be confused with saying you shouldn't strive for more in life or to be complacent; it's more about shifting your mindset at how you look at these situations. 

Lynne goes on to describe how to replace scarcity with sufficiency:

“We each have the choice in any setting to step back and let go of the mindset of scarcity. Once we let go of scarcity, we discover the surprising truth of sufficiency. By sufficiency, I don’t mean a quantity of anything. Sufficiency isn’t two steps up from poverty or one step short of abundance. It isn’t a measure of barely enough or more than enough. Sufficiency isn’t an amount at all. It is an experience, a context we generate, a declaration, a knowing that there is enough, and that we are enough.

Sufficiency resides inside of each of us, and we can call it forward. It is a consciousness, an attention, an intentional choosing of the way we think about our circumstances. In our relationships with money, it is using money in a way that expresses our integrity; using it in a way that expresses value rather than determines value. Sufficiency is not a message about simplicity or about cutting back and lowering expectations. Sufficiency doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive or aspire . . . sufficiency is a context we bring forth from within that reminds us that if we look around us and within ourselves, we will find what we need. There is always enough.”

So for this week, try reframing these thoughts while thinking about your goals and wants. Rather than constantly trying to pick yourself up from little every day fails, start attending to things with a mindset of sufficiency. Open those eyes and take a look around at what is already there, instead of blindly chasing down something-- you just might find that what you're chasing has already been here all along, but it just might look a little differently ❤️️

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