Contentment without Complacency: Living a “Have It All” Life.

May 16, 2012 - PRLog -- In the personal growth industry, you often hear people talk about being discontent, being so fed up with how your life is that you absolutely, positively MUST change it.  It follows that the key to success is being miserable with how things are so you’re driven to make things different.

Dr. Scot Conway heard Tony Robbins tell a story about a man making four million dollars a year who said he was “living like a dog.”  Think about that for a moment.  If YOU have four million dollars a year, would YOU be “living like a dog”?  Is that a  happy man?  Of course not!  

He has ten times what most people have, yet he’s miserable!  On one hand he has everything that money can buy.  But in every way that matters, he has nothing. If you’re miserable, you don’t really have a thing.  If you’re filled with joy, you have everything.  How do you do that and remain driven?

According to Conway, people often mistake Contentment and Complacency.  Contentment means you feel “life is good” exactly the way it is.  Complacency means “I’ll stay here.”  

Many people are afraid of Contentment because they are afraid that if they accept that life is good exactly how it is, they will not move forward.  To them, Contentment and Complacency are tied together.  They need not be!  In fact, we knew this when we were children!

Drawing from Conway’s book Emotional IQ, when we were in first grade, we knew we were not in college.  We knew we were doing first grade work.  We knew that all that was expected of us was to be good first graders.  If we did well, life was good.  We might even have looked forward to school to see our friends.  Maybe we complained about school, but we were very often bored without it.

What did we do the next year?  We started second grade.  A year after that?  Third.  Year after year, we just moved forward.  Then college.  Maybe grad school.  We knew that each year was that grade, and the next year would be the next grade.  Some of us did only what we had to do.  Some of us did everything we could to excel.  We all kept moving forward.

Contentment is realizing that when you’re in high school, you’re supposed to be in high school doing high school stuff.  You want to enjoy those years no matter how hard you work.  When you’re in college, you’re in college.  Again and again, we accept where we are in life, and we enjoy those years.

As independent adults, we keep doing that!  We enjoy life where we are.  We enjoy our business where it is.  We enjoy the contest of us vs. problems.  We look for ways to win.  We enjoy our children when they are young.  We enjoy them when they’re older.  We look at all the good things in life and we savor those.  That’s Contentment.

We want to be Content, NOT Discontent.  We want to NOT be Complacent.  Conway’s new term is “Discomplacent.”  We want to be Discomplacent, that is, not be Complacent.

We can enjoy our children young and look forward to them growing up.  We can enjoy that kindergarten year.  We would never imagine keeping our kid in kindergarten another five years because we enjoyed it!  Complacency doesn’t care if our child moves forward or not.  Contentment enjoys the year.

Discomplacency in life means we are never, ever satisfied with staying still.  We are wildly Discomplacent with the idea of moving backwards!  To us, it would be worse than repeating a grade!  It would be finishing 10th grade and being booted back to 9th!  We move forward.

Using the lesson we learned just going through grades in school when we were young, enjoy life where it is.  Then move forward.

The drive comes from a refusal to stay in one place.  It can be a good place!  We can like this place!  We have enjoy ourselves immensely while in this place.

Then we move forward.

Contentment always.  Complacency never.

The full title of Scot Conway’s book is: Emotional IQ: Instant Emotional Genius in Quick, Easy Steps with a Single Secret Insight.  It can be found on Amazon.com, search: Scot Conway, or follow this link: http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-IQ-Instant-Insight-ebook/...

CONTACT: Dr. Conway may be contacted by email at Scot@MasterRevelation.com or through http://www.MasterRevelation.com.  He is available for media interviews, appearances, keynote addresses and corporate training.