“How Do We Avoid Complacency at Work?” - Andy Crouch

Andy rightly points out that the more constrained we feel in our jobs, the more discouraged we get—but a lot of the time, we don't have much control over which projects we are responsible for. How can we avoid being discouraged?

Andy might be pointing us in the right direction. Maybe the cure for complacency is creativity. If we approach our jobs not just as a task to be accomplished but as an opportunity to be explored, would things begin to look different?

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TRANSCRIPT: So I think after we've been doing our work for awhile, we can easily get kind of complacent . . . especially if we do a good job. But I think we always need to be stretching forward in what we're doing and asking, "How am I growing in what I'm doing? How is my work contributing to the growth of the people that I work with and the field that I work in?" I think there are two related questions that we ought to ask ourselves. One is, "Where is flourishing happening in the place where I work, and how can I encourage that?" So flourishing is just when people are becoming everything they could possibly be. "What is our company doing right? What's our firm doing well that I can add some encouragement to?" Then, the corresponding question is, "Are there places in my workplace, in the community that we work in, or maybe the whole field that I work in where flourishing is not happening?" . . . which is to say, rather than people becoming more and more . . . actually, the more people spend their time on this topic or working on this project, they become less and less. They become constrained; they become discouraged and cynical. Whenever that's happening, it's a sign that creativity is missing and that creativity is needed. So we need to ask what could we add here, what could we change here that would open up again the possibility for people to really flourish as they do this part of the work that we do.