This week on our Instagram, I shared a few thoughts in response to a very common question you may get asked as a business owner, “Where do you want to be in one year? Three years?”, and often we default to thinking about income levels. Instead, I encourage you to find different ways to measure contentment in your business, which inspired today’s blogpost.
The beautiful thing about contentment is that it can look completely different than your friend, neighbor, mother or spouse. It truthfully allows us to lean into our innermost thoughts and find out our values and belief systems.
Because in actuality, where we find contentment is going to be based fully on our core values.
Let’s first begin our deep-dive into the can-of-worms that the question, “Where do you want to be in one year?” opens up for business owners:
This exposes our desire for more.
As entrepreneurs, when we are asking where we see ourselves in the year(s) ahead, we normally default to visualizing a certain income level. I.e., “In 3 years, I want to be making $100K!“.
It’s easy to go to this mindset when our world praises us for having more: more possessions, more responsibilities, more money, more fame, more accolades. It’s the same reason why we associate busyness with success.
Years ago, I read the wonderful book, A Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, by John Mark Comer that’s entire premise is on this idea of rewarding busyness when in reality, is that something we should be praising?
Is it *actually* considered a good thing that you are filled to the brim with commitments and have little time to dedicate to yourself, your friendships, your spouse or your time with Jesus?
That’s why I tend to lean on different factors to identify and measure your contentment in business.
Instead, let’s lean on internal factors for ways to measure contentment in your business.
Consider these factors:
How many hours do you want to be working per week?
Something that my wonderful business coach encourages me to think about is the amount of hours that I’d ideally want to be working within 1, 3 or 5 years. This question is meant to help you visualize different priorities you might have in these different stages of life – for you, this might be introducing kids and wanting to be more present with them, which in turn means, less time you can be present within your business!
How many days out of the week do you want to be at home and present with your kids?
This question goes hand-in-hand with the one above, but this helps to put into perspective the days versus the hours! If you’d like to be at home 3 days a week with your children, that means that majority of the time you’d like to dedicate to your family. From there, you can determine a healthy amount of time to dedicate to your work on the other two days per week.
What time are you dedicating to the things you love to do that aren’t work related?
I love this question because it’s honestly something I struggle with on a daily basis. Likely if you are an entrepreneur, you’ve dove into this lifestyle because you genuinely enjoy the work that you do.
Because of that, it’s really easy to define ourselves by our work or work ourselves to the brink of burnout because we are doing something we love! However, finding activities outside of work that give you joy is so so essentially. You can even use these ideals for when you are in a work rut! For me, here’s some of my favorite ways to spend my time outside of work:
- Reading
- Walking with our dogs
- Playing tennis
- Meeting with friends for dinner
- Having a game night
What activities or tasks in your daily routine feel mundane or non life-giving?
When you are spending the majority of your time working, you want to ensure that what you are doing is actually life-giving and not consuming you away. This is where outsourcing can really bring joy into a business model if you have the finances to cover it.
For me and my business, brand design was something that I enjoyed, but wasn’t life-giving and increased my stress. So, I hired my wonderful designer AK to handle all of the brands for our clients and it has brought be so much more happiness throughout my work day.
I encourage you to reevaluate your tasks and rid yourself of anything that you find yourself not enjoying – that way, you can mitigate moments throughout your day that aren’t fun!
Ways to measure contentment in your business can be different for everyone!
Keep in mind that the ways you measure contentment in your business can be different than the person next to you – and, if you find that measuring your finances is at the forefront of your contentment, that’s totally okay and valid!
This post is merely to open you up to different ways other than income levels to ensure you are remaining content within your business’ operations.
