📍 Hey there and welcome to the contentment creator podcast, the podcast designed especially for creative entrepreneurs, just like you who are committed to a beautiful life that's rooted in courage and contentment, and that's blooming with creativity and prosperity. I'm your host, Ellen Broen, a certified life coach, a singer, a mother, and a lover of alliteration, dogs, and deep conversation.

This podcast is designed to become a part of your daily routine to help you, fellow contentment creator, dig deep to clarify your vision, catalyze your creative flow, and fuel your entrepreneurial fire in just a few inspiring minutes each day. Each episode will focus on how it truly is possible for you to be and have all that you desire through leveraging creative and courageous perspectives and practices.

Please follow and rate this show on whatever podcast app you listen on so you never miss a day and join me in my mission to help a world full of content creators become a world of contentment creators. Each Monday, we will talk about conscious living, and today's episode is all about presence. You know, life has a way of pulling us creators in a hundred directions at once.

Our bodies are here, drinking a cup of coffee or driving your kid to school. But our minds? You're busy solving your latest business bungle, dreaming up your next big project, strategizing how you're going to respond to that email you've marked and remarked unread for several days, and planning dinner --all before the clock even hits 9am.

But presence, real presence, is the quiet invitation to return home. To come back to this moment where life is actually happening. We cannot live conscious lives without harnessing the power of now. Presence is mostly a skill of noticing. It's about sensing that you've drifted away and gently guiding yourself back.

In a way, it's the beginning of belonging to your actual life and not the life you live in your head. And it requires carving out a new pathway of awareness. Now, let's talk about awareness. Many philosophizers think of it as a spotlight, illuminating wherever you choose to focus. Most of us, we're out here with a strobe light, flickering from one moment to the next, trying to piece together snapshots of the world around us while we fill in the blanks with our endless internal thoughts.

But when you turn on that focused light, when you bring it here, right now, something beautiful happens. You start to actually see and notice. You see the squirrels chasing each other in the tree outside the window and smile. You notice your shoulders are tense and you can relax a little into your body.

You see the steam rising from your coffee mug, and you tap into that desire to wrap your hands around that cup and breathe in its earthy aroma. With presence, you breathe a little deeper, you see a little clearer, you notice your body, you feel time. That's what presence does. It shines a light on the details of your life, turning the ordinary into something sacred.

Becoming present is the pathway to contentment, and it's also essential to the process of discerning who you really are and what you really want out of life. So often clients share with me that they have this really amazing success story. They went after their goal with resilience and grit, and they achieved the thing they set their sights on.

But then they almost always describe it as one day waking up to the fact that they're not fulfilled. That experience of waking up to our lives happens

because we're not present.

That experience of waking up to our lives happens because we're not present. But, as a fellow creator, I know you're listening to this like, Yes, I know being present is nice and good sometimes, but deep down, you struggle with this as a way of life. Or, let's be real, you'd already be living it this way.

When I picture this image of sniffing my coffee and looking out the window at the squirrels, I can already hear my brain defending itself. It says, but doesn't that mean I'm either A.) Missing out on valuable and productive thinking time B.) Letting my ADHD take over and fray my focus. Um, hello, you literally just described a squirrel moment or C.) Becoming complacent with how my life is in this moment, instead of moving toward the greater vision of my life.

Asked another way, if I'm too busy enjoying my life right now, doesn't that mean I won't achieve anything great? If I'm too happy and present in the now, won't I lose my work ethic and big vision for my future? To that, I emphatically say, NO! Let's break it down into the micro and the macro. On the macro level, living a present life doesn't mean you lose the visionary and creator parts of you.

This is not an either or, where you're either present and content and floating through life, or in your head and accomplished and in a speedboat, missing all the sights. There's a vibrant world that exists in the both and, one where your vision for the future pulls you forward each day towards what you truly want, and your present self is aware enough to navigate, check in, course correct, rest and refuel, and even enjoy the journey along the way.

You can have the grandest vision and goal that epitomizes your life's purpose. You can have the grandest vision and goal that epitomizes your dream life, but burn yourself out because you weren't present enough to take care of yourself on the journey there. We need both the embodied visionary and the presence of being to realize your dream life.

We need the embodied visionary and the presence of being to realize our dream life on the micro level, embracing presence in the now is an asset to the visionary and creator part of you. Many of the things we spin around in our mind off and on throughout a day are things that could be accomplished in five minutes of our full attention.

But because of the illusion of progress we feel by thinking about it throughout the day, we diffuse our attention and waste our energy ruminating. To illustrate this point, consider your mind as a river with thoughts flowing like leaves on the water. Often we find ourselves diving in, chasing each leaf, getting swept away by the current.

But presence isn't about stopping the river or fishing every leaf out of the river. It's about sitting on the bank, watching the leaves float by without getting carried away in the current. And then when you decide to swim, it's toward your desired destination. The river doesn't cease its flow. The waters don't stop.

The river doesn't cease its flow, the leaves don't stop falling in the water, and you are still actively swimming. But when you stop trying to control the flow and the flaunt, but when you stop trying to control the flow and the flora, and instead take in the world around you on the journey, what's left is a sense of peace.

Presence allows you to step up. Presence allows you to step out of the sweeping current. And just be Just being is like harnessing the magic in life. You start to live the life. You've You start to live the life you're already living, but not noticing. You experience more richness and fullness of the little unextraordinary moments of life, which ultimately elicits more extraordinary experiences.

You bear witness to life's 4k panorama rather than a blurry Polaroid. And the effort of thinking less and being more is what is well worth the investment. It has bedazzled my business, my marriage, my parenthood, and my contentment in life. So take this in. You don't need to be anywhere else. Right now right here is enough.

Thank you for being here with me today. Take a deep breath.

Let this moment fill you. And let's meet again fully present in tomorrow's episode about overcoming self doubt and your inner critic for more creative play. If you enjoyed today's episode If you enjoyed today's episode, please show your support by rating and reviewing in your app of choice. It would truly mean the world to me to hear from you.

If you enjoyed today's episode, please show your support by liking and subscribing to this. Wait.

If you enjoyed today's episode, please show your support by liking, commenting, and subscribing to this channel. It would mean truly the world to me to hear from you and to be with you.