Don’t Stop Your Growth, Keep Failing!
Being okay with the fact that you’re uncomfortable
Have you ever asked yourself how much you’ve grown in the past year? Have you ever asked yourself how much you’ve grown in the past 10 years? It seems that growth is inevitable and that there’s no way of stopping it.
There’s growth in our bodies as we begin to get older and there’s even a more important growth that happens with our mentality. Even if you’re not in the best shape of your life, you can’t deny the fact that your perspective on life has changed drastically since you were younger.
Each day we are learning something new about ourselves and the world. We may not realize it because it happens within a matter of seconds. If we’re not in school or being taught a new skill for our jobs, we don't tell ourselves that we are learning.
We just look at something that happens and assume that it’s part of our lives. Let’s look at driving for example, when you first started to drive, you probably weren’t worried about a certain road being closed because of construction or an accident.
It wasn’t until you were on your way to work, a friend’s house, or an event, and you got stopped because a road was closed. During that time you had to learn how to take a different route to your destination.
At that moment you learned that when you’re driving, you always have to be ready to maneuver. This is also a lesson for life as well where anything can happen and you have to know how to adjust. Whether you want to believe it or not, this is growth and growth can be very uncomfortable at times.
The moments where we are the most stressed, we are growing, we are learning how to deal with different situations in our lives for the first time. Life will force you to grow, even when you’re not ready. Remember when you burned yourself trying to iron your clothes for the first time?
You had to learn that you have to be more careful with the iron but in order for you have to learn that, you had to get burned. The pain of growth can be physical but most of the time it’s mental. The next time you’re stressed, don’t look at it as something negative, look at it as a part of your growth process.
Accept That You’re Growing
Accepting the truth about yourself can be one of the hardest things to do in the world. Even when we know something is true, we’re afraid to admit it because either we’re embarrassed or we don’t know how to treat our ego. Everyone has an ego and as the rapper, Big Sean said “You can’t get rid of your ego.”
You may be experiencing something new in your life where you don’t feel comfortable doing it but you know that it’s necessary for you to move ahead in life. This is growth and until you accept the fact that you’re going to have to be doing it, then you’re going to dislike it.
You may have a job right now that you don’t like, you may not have the option to leave that job right now and that’s okay. What are you going to do to obtain more options or do what you enjoy? You’re going to need to come up with a plan for how you want to exit that job with comfort and stability.
This plan may take up to a year or even ten but once you have a plan set into place for leaving that job and knowing that you’ll be doing something you enjoy full time then you will be more than happy to go to work.
This all comes from acceptance, it’s not easy to accept that you’re behind in life and it’s even harder to accept that you’re going backward instead of forward.
When you do have the courage to stand up to your ego and you’re able to say that you’re behind, you’ll have a weight lifted off of your shoulders and you will be more focused on your goal. That way you will be able to start going forward and in the direction, you want to go. The more acceptance you have about your life, the easier it will be to navigate through it.
Use It to Your Advantage
Okay, you’re growing and you now realize it, what do you do now? Appreciation for your growth is very important to the overall confidence that you have about yourself. Start reviewing your journey and look at the moments where your growth made sense and where it didn’t.
You want to put most of your focus toward the time where it was most noticeable. This could’ve been where you learned how to swim, taken driving lessons, or had your first presentation. How did those situations turn out for you and how can you implement those same techniques to succeed in your life today.
What you may fail to realize is that you actually have a lot of the keys to your own secrets. You just don’t know how to put those in the right lock, also you have to be able to trust those techniques as well.
Let’s look back at the first presentation you had when you were in school. Do you remember how nervous you were when getting prepared for that speech? You were so nervous that you did everything that you could to get ready for it. You made sure you read from notecards every night before bed, you practiced your speech a few times in the mirror and you also studied how other people did their presentations as well.
When the time came for you to present, you ended up doing good because you prepared so much for it without even realizing it. This was a life-changing moment for you and that was where you found one of your first keys to life.
So, now it’s your job to figure out how you are going to use those same techniques to get prepared for your next battle. You may have to practice a little longer than when you were a kid and you may have to study harder too but you remember the feelings you had when taking part in those things, you have to match that energy in order for the keys to unlock your next challenge.
The Journey is Uncomfortable But Beautiful
Even when you catch yourself starting to grow, it gets a little tiring after a while. It gets to the point where it’s not even exciting anymore, this tends to cause a lot of people to give up and not want to grow anymore.
You need to always look back at your growth and appreciate it for what it is because without that growth you wouldn't be as knowledgeable about life today.
If you didn't have growth, everything that you did in the past would’ve been a waste of energy. You need to appreciate the times where you hit rock bottom and you felt like you wouldn't recover.
Even if you’re going through that right now, it gets better as long as you decide to keep growing no matter how uncomfortable it gets. Have trust in your process because even though it may be different from everyone else's, it’s unique in its own way and it will all make sense when you look back at it.
Don’t try to stop your growth, because you can’t. Accept it and keep pushing yourself each and every day to get better. I’ll leave you with a quote from Carrie Fisher that says
“Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.”
