This week I want to give you perspective on Where Personal Growth Comes From? Good question, right?
Well…it comes from THREE places:
1. From the crap that happens to us in life: unwanted CURVEBALLS force us to grow, whether we like it or not, to expand to cope with whatever craptastic event has come our way.
2. From positive circumstances that come into our life: new baby / new job / more money / OPPORTUNITIES that are welcome but stretch us to meet them.
3. When we CHOOSE to expand and grow as people by CREATING INTENTIONAL personal growth. This might be signing up for a half-marathon, or for a programme of guided personal growth like my coaching Academy. This is where you consciously choose you are ready to EXPAND who you are, and who you are BECOMING.
Notice the first two are largely PASSIVE: we grow by default because of what life throws AT us. It’s a kind of uncontrolled personal growth: it just happens TO us, we HAVE to grow to COPE.
The third option is OUR CHOICE. Its ACTIVE. It’s where we say to ourselves that we are READY for MORE of something in our lives. That we will DELIBERATELY CREATE
CHALLENGE for ourselves in order to grow and become the expanded version of ourselves we can be.
The challenge we choose in order to stimulate our personal growth might be PHYSICAL (learning to windsurf, dropping eating sugar), it might be MENTAL (getting on top of our finances or learning techniques to reduce overthinking), it might be EMOTIONAL (having that difficult conversation we have been avoiding) or it might be SPIRITUAL in terms of personal expansion (developing a meditation practice).
We CANNOT help but GROW through life because life WILL throw things at us – good and bad, wanted and unwanted – all the way through life…till the day we die! That is a fact.
What I find the coolest… is the people with the CAPACITY to SEEK ADDITIONAL personal growth through CHOICE. That they actively STEP TOWARDS expansion and make it happen for themselves through challenge, as well as the inevitable coping with what life brings.
(My Coaching Academy is like a COCOON for CHOSEN personal growth. An incubator for it. A safe, supported space where it can be created in a gradual but irresistible draw forwards. I bloody love that I get to create that for a living.)
However, you get your GROWTH, passively or actively, know that it’s all about a reaction to CIRCUMSTANCES.
Either your GROWTH RESPONSE to meet circumstances that happen TO you. This is inevitable. Plus, your GROWTH RESPONSE to circumstances you CHOOSE to introduce into your life in order to CHALLENGE and change you.
I want you to know, that although crap in your life does indeed make you grow, there are two other ways to do it! I call them the THREE C’s!
So, we have:
1. Curveballs &Crap
2. Challenges
3. Choice
Does this ring bells for you? You can let me know here if it’s a helpful perspective for you to consider! If you are ready for more of Option 3 “Choice” you can see how that would look for you here.
Some of us have done FAR too much of our growth in the first category… this is your sign to re-align those ratios!
