Message From Julie: Lessons from My Mat – Santosha and Living in “The Gain”

Author: Julie Chance, Founder of Action-Strategies-By-Design

The theme this month at The Mat Yoga Studio where I practice is Santosha, the concept of contentment, acceptance, and “enoughness”. During a class the teacher shared that when she thinks of Santosha as contentment she has an adverse reaction. She explained that she is someone who always wants to make things a little bit better. In Strengths Finder terms I would guess she is a Maximizer.

She went on to say that as she reflected deeper on the subject, she shifted her mindset to think about Santosha as being able to stop, recognize what is good in the moment and celebrate accomplishments. This reminded me of the idea of “living in the gain” from the book The Gap and The Gain: The High Achiever’s Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. The book encourages leaders to take time to look back and celebrate successes rather than constantly chasing an always moving bar of perfection.

The more I thought about this the more curious I became about how the two ideas might work together to enhance leadership effectiveness. I turned to ChatGPT as a thought partner to explore this.

The Gap, The Gain and Santosha

When we are in The Gap, we measure success against what we haven’t achieved. This leads to dissatisfaction, stress and feeling behind. In The Gain we measure against the progress that has been made resulting in greater confidence, motivation and fulfillment.  Santosha allows us to pursue growth without tying our emotional state (how we feel) to results, approval or circumstances. Another way to think about this is that we can pursue growth without attachment to the results. In specific we want to avoid attaching our identity to the results.

Most high performing individuals and organizations live almost exclusively in The Gap. The focus is on an ideal future state, a higher benchmark, or the next big goal. This creates a constant focus on what hasn’t been accomplished or what isn’t good enough. While this might work in the short run, the long-term cost is high. No matter how much is achieved it never feels like enough. Wins are overlooked or quickly dismissed. This “not enough” focus leads to fatigue and burnout for individuals and for teams.

Integrating the concepts of living in The Gain and Santosha into our leadership approach helps us and our team achieve high performance with greater ease and flow. Given the level of burnout being reported today by both managers and individual contributors, this is an alluring promise.

The Benefit to Leaders and their Teams

In addition to reducing burnout, living in the gain and practicing Santosha brings several more potential benefits to leaders, teams, and organizations – a true win-win-win. These benefits include:

• Better decision making because amygdala hijacks are avoided and everyone spends more time operating from their prefrontal cortex which allows for focus, problem solving, creativity, and innovation.
• More consistent performance under pressure because there is more focus on what is going well and setbacks are viewed as inevitable learning opportunities.
• Greater accountability because progress is acknowledged and the inherent value of the individual is separated from the current situation shifting ownership from external to internal.
• Stronger team culture because people focus more on how they contribute and less on internal competition and how they measure up.
• Increased resilience and adaptability because acknowledging progress helps maintain momentum and setbacks are less emotionally charged.

How to Integrate Living in The Gain and Santosha into Your Leadership Approach

Would you like to achieve better results with greater ease and flow and help your team do this too? It is actually pretty simple. And like so many things in life just because it is simple doesn’t mean it is easy. It takes discipline and intention.

Here is an activity to get you started. You might even integrate this into your team meetings as a replacement for your current status or progress reviews.

Ask the team:

• What is working right now even if it’s not perfect?
• What have we already accomplished that we were once struggling with?

As a team identify:

• Three specific wins or areas of progress since the last review
• One challenge that was handled better than it would have been in the past

Ask

• What are the next one to three meaningful actions we need to take to move forward (move forward – not achieve the perfect outcome)

How do you and your team currently define success? Is it always just out of reach? Always tied to what’s missing? If so, don’t be surprised when gaining momentum and making progress feels hard. Shift the lens. Recognize what’s working. Take the emotion out of setbacks. You may find that you start achieving better results with greater ease and flow!