70: Sufficiency is Not Complacency.
Be Brilliant In Your Business Podcast, Episode 70
“Many of us are afraid that if we allow ourselves to truly love our life exactly as it is, then we will lose our desire for more. But the opposite is true.”
We all want to enjoy our life. We want to feel proud and satisfied with the work we do, and delight in the small moments that give us meaning.
But as much as we hear, and conceptually understand, that "this is all there is," the idea of sufficiency trips many of us up...Because it causes us to question "What's the point of ambition if we already have sufficiency?"
In this episode I'm talking about how sufficiency creates more, not less.
Key Takeaways:
The best we will ever feel is the same as the best we feel now.
Why being satisfied with things exactly as they are will NOT stop you from creating or having more.
Our inner critic serves a valuable purpose, unless you use it against yourself.
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Transcript
You are listening to Be Brilliant in Your Business, the podcast for small business owners to be focused, energized and in charge as you build the business you love.
Hey, hey Mavericks, how you guys doing? Today we are talking about sufficiency, one of my favorite topics, and how sufficiency is not complacency - an even better part of this conversation! So let's jump into it.
So this morning, I was sitting outside and I was Watching my neighbor play in the yard with his baby. He was tossing him up in the air and just laughing so much as he watched the baby laugh. He was having so much fun experiencing his baby, having fun. And I was having so much fun watching all of this.
And it got me thinking, this really is the best that life will ever be.
This moment. This feeling of joy and completeness. This is it.
And I think that sometimes we hear that this moment is all there is, and that our purpose in life is simply to live it and to love it. And while we understand this conceptually, and we've experienced moments like this, it really trips us up.
Because we think “well, then what's the point of wanting more?? What is the point of having ambition building businesses that make a lot of money? Or of writing a bestseller, or getting yourself featured in Forbes, or buying a beautiful house on the lake? (This is what I want.)
We work so hard for these dreams that we have, so that we can enjoy them once we have them. But on the other side of having them, the best we will ever feel is the same as the feeling of love and joy that we get when we watch a baby laugh. Or the same sense of satisfaction we get when we go for a morning hike, or the same decadence that we experience when we eat chocolate lava cake.
So why bother? Why go through all of that effort, all of the struggle and the disappointment? And why wait, when you can feel all of these things right now today with the simplest things in life. Why are we doing this?
It's a challenging question for most of us, because we are afraid. If we really look at this, if we accept that it's true that we have everything we need right now…If we really allowed ourselves to love our life exactly as it is, then we would lose our desire to have more. We would stop trying, we would become complacent, and we'd live a smaller life than what we're really capable of.
I see this fear a lot with my clients who, like me, are highly ambitious and very future focused. We, and I'll use the collective we here, we get kind of attached to the struggle. We do a lot of talking about how we'd like to not work so hard, and how we'd like things to be easier. How we'd like to be more present in our lives. But deep down, a lot of us really believe that we need our insatiable critic to motivate us,
And I want to stop you before you deem your insatiable critic, the villain, because it's not. All of these parts of ourselves have a really important role to play in our lives. There are no villains. You want your inner critic around, you just don't want it to be the one that is in charge of how you treat yourself.
Your critic doesn't need to be what drives you. It's actually there to support you. It gives you critical thinking it helps you make decisions that will support you in the long term, versus just responding to all of your hedonistic wants all day every day, right? Your critic is here for you, but don't use it against yourself.
So anyway, let me come back to this sufficiency is not scary, it's not complacency. being satisfied and not needing more in your life is only going to create more abundance. in your life,
And instead of telling you why that's true, I'm going to just ask you to think about this for yourself. How is it true? If you have enough time, then how do you treat your time? What do you create with the time that you have? If you have enough money, how do you treat your money? And how do you create more of it? The same goes for joy, and love and satisfaction and pride. Having sufficiency and all of these areas will only increase your capacity to have and to create more of it.
And let me just throw this out there. The worst case scenario is that I'm wrong. The worst case scenario is that feeling sufficient now would cause you to stop creating and that you'd live each day doing nothing but feeling love and joy and satisfaction and pride, in exchange for your nothing.
But I think that the real worst case scenario is the one that we are each already living, every single moment that we spend focusing on what we're lacking, that always closes off a part of our creativity. And it diminishes our capacity to have and create. And it causes us to suffer unnecessarily.
This simple shift in our awareness can move us from our worst case scenario to our best case scenario, instantly. And let's just imagine what we might be able to create from there.
I hope this has been a useful insight for you this week, and I'm here to support you if you want any help on working to create true sufficiency and abundance. Your current and in your future business, so feel free to reach out. Have a great week.
Hey, I know that running a small business can feel complicated. So let me help you uncomplicate it. I teach people how to harness their creative brainpower to take clear and focused action to accomplish their goals without burning out. I offer a free one hour consultation where we uncover what is really getting in your way right now.
And I'll show you step by step how to create an aligned business that you will love to build. In this conversation. I'm going to give you the foundation to work on confidently every single day, and it's going to be super simple. I want you to have the time and energy and freedom for everything that you want in life. And I want you to start having it right now. To find a time that works for you, visit linsibrownson.com