Highlighting 5 Key Points About Self-Growth
I started this blog several years ago, and I started public speaking many years before that. But COVID times, despite the physical and mental isolation that has accompanied part of the last year, has surprisingly helped me — it has accelerated my period of introspection and self-growth. My self-esteem has become much more unconditional than conditional, which I did a very short talk on here. So I wanted to take a second to scan back through the past year to highlight a few key principles I have learned about myself, and hopefully they may apply to and help someone else along their journey.
5 Lessons learned from a year of self-growth
Movement is everything. Not physical movement (although for many evolutionary reasons we think best while we are indeed on the move), but the attempt at progress. The word “attempt” is purposefully used here because you won’t have progress every day. I love thinking in the terms author James Clear uses, “1% better every day.” It won’t work like that. But of over a month, if you have 20 days of 1% better, 5 days of nothing and 5 days of 1% diminishment, you’ve grown. In this hypothetical math, you’ve grown 15% in just a month. So movement really matters.
To move forward, to progress, you have to put in the work every single day. It sounds trite, but here is why it matters. One day of intentional stagnation can lead to a week or more of stagnation. It can — and most likely will often — lead to a period of reversion to a previous version of yourself that didn’t put in the work. I don’t use intentional to mean that you choose to stall. Rather, that you just don’t attempt to introspect, work on goals, learn, write, read, grow, whatever it is. Just one day of complete absence from any kind of growth pursuit, and you will likely stop the progress you have been making in its tracks for more than a day. Self-growth is inertia-based, and so is self-diminishment.
I’ve used the word diminishment twice. That’s actually a nice positive I’ve taken away from the last year. The days I have not focused on bettering myself in some small way, I have felt diminished. Which means I really do feel the progress when I am growing. For many years I felt zero diminishment, even on my worst days. That’s a really bad sign. That means you are moving backward and do not even know it. Put in other terms, that means you are in a rut.
Others will love talking about your flaws as you seek them out yourself — and when you seek them out you won’t mind talking about them. But for many, if you ask them about something they have expressed they want to work on, you’ll hear, “I’d rather not talk about it today” or “I’m going to start next week” etc. That’s fine, of course; you aren’t them nor should you try to impose your will on anyone. I have made that mistake — I’ve droned on too long about learning and growth and so forth, and I’m not doing myself or the other person any favors when I do. But I would take a mental note every time someone does excitedly talk about your flaws and then shirks away from their own. Just store it away and say this will never be me again. Because at one point in your life that very likely was you, too. Never again.
Finally, most importantly, self-growth is liberating. That is the one word that comes up within me over and over, time and time again. When I am learning, I feel free from attachments. When I am writing, free from entanglements. In therapy, there are no distracting topics or issues. Running in the mountains — often not a worry in the world. I am literally just at peace with myself, with others… with the universe. I can see others who have that same liberation; you can pick up on that quickly over time. I can see others at the cusp. And I can often see when others are oblivious to the fact they are unhappy and not evolving and do not even know it. Again, this is all fleeting. You can quickly unravel the growth you’ve found. But there’s a foolproof way that you also can keep moving forward. It’s only that you have to try. I recently told my therapist I was doing 89% great. His response: “Let’s shoot for 90%.”