Balancing Ambition with Contentment

A year ago I decided to change my life. There were several areas I wanted to change, most notably my health and my career. In order to make these changes I'd have to radically alter my behaviour. Doing the same things that had got me into my current state of affairs at the time would not be adequate to implement the changes I wanted to make.

In my case, my decisions were born out of negative emotions such as frustration and disgust. I was fed up with being overweight, unhealthy, and lethargic. I also decided that now was the time to really push my career forward without screwing it up. "Enough!", I said to myself. "I've had it, I will no longer settle for poor health and I will no longer muddle along financially from one day to the next."

How often do we hear stories of people who have reached some turning point in their lives where they would no longer tolerate some situation and made the decision to change. Whether that change is losing some excess fat, quitting smoking, seeking a new career, deciding to have a child, travelling the world... Many of these major decisions are brought about from negativity - a general dissatisfaction with things to one degree or another.

From this we can conclude that those negative emotions can be good for us if they cause us to stop and think about what is not yet great in our lives. But good will only come of it if we decide to make a positive change. There is usually some threshold that has to be broken. If you had gained 5lbs in excess weight would you be frustrated with yourself, vow to lose the weight and never to put it back on again? If you are an average person then I suspect not. However if you are a professional bodybuilder striving to keep a body fat level in the single digits then 5lb could be quite a disaster.

We all have our own thresholds for any given set of circumstances. That is one of the ways in which we are all different. I don't like to be overweight. 15 lbs or so not too much of a problem. Even 30ish I could deal with but it bothered me a bit. When I started reaching nearer 50lbs overweight something had to change. But therein lies a problem. What happens if I reach my threshold, make the positive changes and start successfully losing the weight and slowly lower myself safely below my threshold? I become contented once again and this can mean that the desire to continue losing weight is lost!

This can happen with any goal. What if you are struggling financially and you decide to start a part time business in order to make some extra money. You start out vigorously and pour every spare hour into that business and slowly an income builds but once it reaches a certain level you become comfortable and you begin to slack off. Before long you are hardly working on your business and it slowly dies along with your dream of financial freedom.

The essence of the problem is that as we set goals and move towards them we are constantly fluctuating between negative states of frustration and dissatisfaction which gives us ambition and drives us forward, and those positive (but dangerous) states of comfort and contentment. As we move towards our goal, our desire to keep working at the goal diminishes and we sabotage our efforts.

How can we break this cycle? We need to get to a place that is between these two emotional states and stay there. Obviously we don't want to be feeling extreme frustration on a daily basis as that is too painful but we need to feel that something is not quite right, it could still be better. On the other hand we must not let ourselves become complacent.

I believe that one way to achieve a balance between these two states is by constantly re-evaluating our position and also, constantly moving the goal posts. I'll go back to my weight loss issue for another example. The first goal I set was to reach 25% body fat in one year. After one year I was still over 30%. Did I just press on towards my original goal? No, I set a new one, a tougher one. I knew I could lose the fat and I also knew that I could do better than 25%. My new goal is 15% which is very ambitious. For a woman, a level that low is usually reserved for athletes so it should keep me going for a while! But if I get to a point where I am actually getting close to it then I'll set a new goal. It may not necessarily be to lose yet more fat, but I might want to increase my lean body mass so that I can eat more calories for example.

Very few people set any goals at all so if you are the minority that do then congratulate yourself! But I fear that many people who set goals put them on a pedestal and worship them, believing that any deviation from that goal is a failure. Not so. On a regular basis review your goals. Ask yourself whether it needs tweaking, or indeed if it makes any sense at all any more. Things change, life changes, we change and if we don't change our goals to match we'll be striving for something that doesn't serve us. I will talk more about goals in another post but for now the point I want to get across is that to avoid becoming complacent we must constantly re-evaluate and set higher goals for ourselves.