Personal Growth: How To Be Satisfied with Life

People love dressing up the word "satisfied" with labels like single, sassy, and happy, yet almost nobody sits down to talk about plain old satisfaction on its own terms. To me, it's the final piece of the personal growth process. I was at my desk one day trying to pin down what actually closes that process out, and satisfaction was the only answer that kept coming back.

If you've worked through the earlier articles and done the exercises I laid out, you've probably built yourself a personal growth list by now: the things you'd like to change about your life. But have you stopped to ask whether you're satisfied with the life you already have? Skip that question and all the effort you've poured into "growth" goes nowhere, because you still aren't clear on what would bring you real fulfillment.

Developmental psychology looks at how people build their thinking and their skills from childhood into adulthood. The part that matters most here is the adult stages, the idea that certain milestones belong to certain ages. A fifty-year-old, for instance, is supposed to look back and feel content with what they've done, mistakes included, rather than still scrambling to figure out what to do with their life. You're meant to sort that out in your twenties. Anyone who has lived a while knows it rarely works that cleanly.

Doubt visits all of us. We second-guess, we replay the forks in the road and wonder whether a different choice would have handed us a different life. I'm no exception. One afternoon at work I spent three straight hours chewing on exactly those questions, and I started wondering how many other people sit there doing the same thing.

As I turned it over, I ran down a private inventory of every mistake I made in my twenties. Then I traced what each one cost me: wrecked credit, a career that stalled, the nagging feeling that I'm forever playing catch-up with everybody around me. Learning to fix those problems and pull a lesson out of them was part of my growth. To get there, though, I first had to reach a point where I felt satisfied.

A pastor of mine once said that the moment you start chasing a perfect life, peace and stability slip out of reach. Road blocks will show up regardless. The trick is turning them to your benefit. When life hands you lemons, figure out how to make lemonade.

Stop living in the past. Stay stuck back there and you'll never move ahead or find any genuine contentment in the moment you're actually living. That means letting go of whatever you think you missed, too. It is never too late to begin again. And if you keep landing in the same spot over and over in some corner of your life, read it as a signal: the lesson isn't learned yet, and there's more work to do.

Don't try to repair everything by morning. Recovering from poor choices takes time, so handle what can be handled right away and set both short-term and long-term goals. Some items on your list will only mend through the slow, natural work of time passing. The quicker you make peace with that, the easier your goals become.

Keep your eyes on what you're after. Being content with yourself clears your thinking and builds staying power, the kind that lets you hold your ground even when you're standing there alone. Other people's opinions about what's best for you stop pushing you around so easily.

Real self-fulfillment asks for time, planning, and the honest work of settling old personal issues. Do it and you come out the other side with clarity and a sense for steering around future road blocks. First, though, you have to get comfortable with where you stand right now and own the outcomes of the choices you've already made. What you end up with is a steadier, more complete version of yourself.

So what's your take? Have you ever stalled out on a goal because you were too busy feeling dissatisfied with yourself to move? What did you do about it? - Heather Browning, MBA, BA