8 Things I've Learned about Personal Growth
I find there are two types of people in this world - people who are actively, consciously making efforts of self-improvement and those that aren't. Now before we go getting all offended or snappy about categorizing people into these two categories, it's worth noting that some of the most successful people I know are in the second category. They're not intentionally engaging in Personal Growth, but somehow, in the course of their lives, they, as Nike would say, just do it.
(There are also plenty of people in the "not actively trying" category that are doing absolutely nothing to improve themselves and continue to struggle with the same demons over and over. I choose not to think about these people.)
But if you are here, I have it on pretty good authority that you're at least trying to be in the first category. And for that, I applaud you.
My journey of personal growth really kicked into high gear when I decided that it was as worthwhile an activity to spend time on than everything else people do normally talk about. Why is it more acceptable for me to spend time getting my body healthy, but not my mind? I can work on a job somebody else asked me to do, but we don't like talking about something I'm doing for myself?
Personal growth is investing in your future happiness. And just like investing in the financial sense, this work compounds over time.
Every piece of work we do to understand our mind, have a healthier relationship with ourselves and others and improve our natural impulses and instincts is work that may feel like small steps forward today but are building our habits for the future.
But as I have been spending more energy on this task, one of the first things I struggled to wrap my head around was "What does growth even look like?" This was a plea to understand how I would know if what I was doing was working. How I could tell if I was on the right track. But engaging with this question have led to some far larger realizations about what personal growth, or any type of growth really mean to me.
This comes down to 8 core concepts:
We grow on our own.
To grow, we have to acknowledge that we are not our thoughts, our feelings or our experience.
We cannot grow without loss.
The problem and pain is the way.
Growing is a great act of courage.
We grow by doing, not by consuming.
We change by failing and trying again.
We grow in spite of others' opinions.
1 — We grow on our own.
The real type of growth - sustainable and long-lasting - can't be forced or obligated on to you. It is something we have to decide to do on our own and it is also very much an individual journey. Part of this comes from the reality that being told something or reading something is never as powerful as realizing it yourself. This will sound super familiar for anybody who has spent time in therapy. In her book Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, Lori Gottlieb, a therapist, describes it best: "Rather than steering people straight to the heart of the problem, we nudge them to arrive there on their own, because the most powerful truths—the ones people take the most seriously—are those they come to, little by little, on their own."
It can be solitary. I struggled with this for a while because I have historically been such a verbal processor (more on that on a later date) and when I really started to put the hours in on this work, I realized there was some of this I couldn't talk through in therapy or with my friends, either because I needed to process without inputs from other people or it was something I wasn't ready to admit to others yet. But because we do it all on our own, often just sitting in silence, actively engaging with our own thoughts.
After dedicating some serious time to this, it dawns on you that growing ourselves is the most basic act of self-care.
What could be more nurturing or generous to yourself than dedicating real time out of your days to making yourself happier and healthier?
2 — To grow, we have to acknowledge that who we are as people is not the same as our thoughts, our feelings or our experiences.
This has been a difficult existential one for me. When you first hear the statement, "I am not my thoughts," it sounds absurd. The Untethered Soul is really what broke this one open for me and helped me see that while our experience, our feelings and our thoughts are something that we witness or experience, they do not define us. And more importantly, we have the power to change them.
It was a rather freeing realization that I wasn't married to my bitchy, critical inner voice. And the feeling of malaise and sadness I was experiencing at the time was not core to who I was. I could be free of those if I chose to be.
The ability to interact with our thoughts and feelings, without accepting them, is a powerful principle. Meditation has been crucial for me in learning this because it takes a lot of work at the beginning to even be able to see your thoughts in third person. A therapist once explained this to a friend of mine as thoughts being books on a bookshelf and while you have to acknowledge they're all there, you can choose which to engage with. My therapist has explained it as kids on a school bus - you're in the drivers seat and all the kids are in the back, the mean kid, the insecure kid, the distracted kid, and its your job to choose who to listen to, if anybody at all!
Separating ourselves from our thoughts and feelings then puts us back in control. We will always have the emotional reactions - it's important not to try to ignore or numb out feelings - but we can acknowledge them and then choose whether or not to engage. I certainly don't want to have to believe that who I am as a person are these self-critical thoughts or irrational feelings, so its rather freeing to be able to separate my sense of self from their crazy whims.
3 — We cannot grow without loss.
We only have a certain set of beliefs about ourselves and those inform how we act, how we think and how we spend our time. We don't just get to add better beliefs on top and keep the old stuff - and in fact, why would we want to? In order to move on to the better, we have to let go of "the before" or "what is".
Now this immediately triggers fear in a lot of people and it's natural - it's our emotional brain saying, "wait, that sounds hard and scary. Wouldn't it be safer to stay right here?" And that's a fair reaction from our emotional brain. But we want the growth more than the safety, so we choose not to listen to it.
There are plenty of things we are happy to lose: our limiting beliefs, our self-doubt, our bad habits. And that part doesn't scare us. We're mostly scared to lose what we perceive as "good" in our lives. And part of growing is the realization that most of us have been conflating "good" and "safe," "comfortable," or "familiar." Growth is moving into the unknown in search of better and this may mean that we lose somethings about our life today that we like.
But as Joseph Cambell says, "We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us."
This concept still scares me a little bit but I know that's because it's true!
4 — The problem and pain is the way.
Often, discomfort or pain appears when we finally acknowledge that something about the way things are is no longer okay with us. To the previous point, often a key part of growth is realizing what we currently view as "good," "safe," and "familiar" may have been hiding some of our insecurities, our fears and our wounds.
So we have to run at the pain or discomfort. We have to go straight there.
It's the clue for what is keeping us "safe," keeping us trapped in the version of ourselves today.
This can be in the form of nerves, anxiety, bad dreams, worrying or tension in our body. These things are coming from our emotional, animal brain, trying to somehow tell us (whether through our minds or our bodies) to slow.the.fuck.down to keep us out of harms way.
There was a great quote from BriannaWest on Instagram: "Within your uncertainty was also your potential, and within your lostness was also an opportunity to be found, and within your discomfort was also a chance to see what you needed to change, and changing it was you becoming the person you were always meant to be."
We have to stop using these signals as excuses to stop and instead confront them in order to deal with the root cause. Lori Gottlieb also said: ""If I’m clinging to the suffering so tightly, I must be getting something out of it." If we really look ourselves, we know that we only grow by doing the hard thing - as scary as it is, the only way out is through.
5 — Growing is a great act of courage.
We have face our fears and insecurities. But more than that, growing always involves facing the fear that we might fail and screw up our whole life in the process.
I choose to look at that fear as a sign that I am are on the precipice of something great and that fear is my animal brain has triggered to try to keep us safe. But I don't want safe. (This always reminds me of that great Marianne Williamson quote: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?' Actually, who are you not to be?")
The work of growth is hard. It is harder than those people I mentioned at the top of the article who never put in any work on themselves. But the world is not easy. Life isn't easy. And the good news is, that even though the act of growing is hard - by doing so, we are making ourselves better prepared for the "hard" that's out there.
"There is no passion to be found in playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living." - Nelson Mandela
6 — We grow by doing, not by consuming.
All this talk about the merits and bravery of growth but how do we actually do it? I looked for the answer to this in stacks of self help books. And let me tell you, it's really easy to go down the rabbit hole of learning and consumption and feel virtuous. Dan Harris makes this excellent point in his book, 10% Happier, "The Buddha himself didn’t claim to be a god or a prophet. He specifically told people not to adopt any of his teachings until they’d test-driven the material themselves."
There is no replacement and in fact, no real change, until we put this stuff into practice. It is easy to think about the right or evolved thing to do but much harder to do the actions.
"Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer there is no road, the road is made by walking." Anthony Machado
We have to pressure test the wisdom we consume, decide what we agree with and what doesn't work for us, pressure test it, and build the muscle memory so we have it when it matters.
7 — We change by failing and trying again.
You don't get it right the first time. This something that I, a recovering perfectionist, hate. But I can tell you from experience you start trying to be better and at some point, we fail. We revert back. We take the easy route. And when we hit this point, we have to redouble our efforts and try again. We have to push through the failure, otherwise we'll never actually teach out bodies to commit even when the momentum is not in our favor.
Dan Harris writes about this in 10% Happier, which documents his journey of personal growth through meditation. When he struggled, he relied on telling himself: ""All I had to do was tell myself: if it doesn’t work, I only need the grit to start again." This also holds true to the anonymous quote: "I will hold myself to a standard of grace not perfection."
8 — We grow in spite of others' opinions.
This is the other side of the "growth is solitude" coin. Sometimes the people in your life can't help you with growth because you have to do it on your own. But also, sometimes people in our life are in our way.
To change is to want more, and to want more is to say you are worth more.
Some people are deeply threatened by those who believe they're worth more - mostly because deep down, they are so scared that they are not enough. Brene Brown in her Netflix Special about Daring Greatly, says it beautifully: "If you are not in the arena, daring greatly, I am not open to or interested in your feedback about my work." People are comfortable with who we are today. They're comfortable with small, quiet, non-challenging people. But that's not what we're meant for.
More importantly, these critiques or doubts from those around us are is inevitable and we have to love them because they are at a different, usually earlier, place in their journey. But more importantly, we do not have to listen to them.
--
So there we are. 8 things I've learned about personal growth. I circle back again and again to remind myself because this journey is hard but it is so worth it. Regardless of whether you are just starting out or you have been doing this work for a long time, I see you. You are brave. Keep going.
I hope for all of you that you do something today to make you a little more at peace with yourself. To love yourself a little more. And to put some piece of work in motion to grow into an even bigger, stronger, wiser version of yourself tomorrow.
