All the flowers-chocolate-champagne energy that goes along with Valentine’s Day got me thinking a lot about excess and opulence. But not in the way you’re probably thinking.
Occasional indulgences are wonderful. Eat that cake! Take that long bubble bath. Buy yourself the most perfect bouquet you’ve ever seen.
But…be super careful not to live there. Indulgence is a place for visiting, not for taking up permanent residence.
This is true particularly when talking about indulgent emotions—those cozy feelings we love to hold onto (but don’t truly serve us). An indulgent emotion is an emotion that’s way in your comfort zone, you’d prefer to cling to, but that doesn’t quite get you where you want to be. The results just aren’t there.
Doubt
For example, one emotion people seem to gravitate toward and indulge in a lot is DOUBT. But it’s only natural, right? Isn’t doubt in all of us to protect us?
Well…maybe not. Doubt is a tricky one because, on the surface, it seems like a necessary thing to protect us from harm. However, it can cause harm of its own.
When doubt gets into your bones and causes you to second-guess yourself, your abilities, your talents, and your worth, it can debilitate you. It can keep you living small and never attempting…well…anything. All out of fear.
Sometimes clients say to me that they’re afraid to build their own “dream life” (whatever that may look like) because they’re scared to fail. Instead of believing in themselves and putting in the work, they’ve decided to just fail upfront/ahead of time.
They aren’t even giving themselves the chance to succeed or fail! And what a shame. All the missed possibilities that lie there, surrounded by fear.
Comfort
Another common indulgent emotion is COMFORT. There’s even a whole pop culture phenomenon, I am told, around it referred to as hygge.
I mean, who doesn’t like being cozy? We all want familiarity, feeling safe, and a general sense of comfort, whether physical or mental.
However, issues arrive when we fall headlong into comfort and try to avoid being uncomfortable at all costs. It’s all great in theory, but no one grows or changes by being comfy.
In order to for us to evolve, we have to allow discomfort. To level-up, we are going to have to be ok with the unfamiliar.
Think about strength training for a second. No muscle has ever grown stronger by doing what it always does (staying cozy). To create stronger muscles, we must stress them, do stuff out of the ordinary, and keep at it. Heck—to even keep the muscle you already have, you gotta move it.
Or, say, with fear of public speaking—no one ever conquered that by avoiding talking in front of people. You have to DO IT to get better at it.
What would your life look like if you became willing to be uncomfortable? Think of what you could accomplish if you got ok with change and stopped indulging in doubt and comfort.
And look for part 2 in the series, where we’ll talk about some other indulgent emotions to look out for!
