At one of my recent meetings, someone mentioned “going for a drive” after an argument with her husband in order to clear her head. That night, I was driving home and appreciating the drive with the night lights, the trees flying past me and the empty road winding ahead of me. It was beautiful and magical. And I was truly in the moment then and feeling alive. At that moment, it truly clicked for me that the journey is just as fun, if not more so than the destination. The Journey of Personal Growth is the same. The learning and discovery that’s involved is actually pretty exciting. 

Every journey has unexpected twists and turns. Who will you meet? What new food can you discover? Can you treat yourself to new books, magazines, treats? I used to get frustrated at the idea that the journey is more important than the goal but in fact, it’s all part of the fun and the learning. And the anticipation of the destination can keep us going.

The journey of personal growth

The journey of personal growth is also part of the fun and the learning. Of course, like all journeys, things will go wrong, you might even hurt yourself but it is all worth it. It took me a while to also get my head round the fact the journey ends only when we end. Can we ever be fully ‘grown up’ personally? Is it possible to really know everything about ourselves? Perhaps our lives are to get as close as possible to this? But what’s our purpose? How does it fit to our own journey of personal growth? 

Why personal growth?

So many questions! As Einstein said, “once you stop learning, you start dying”. I’ll take that a step further and say that if we don’t have curiosity, then we don’t ask questions and then we don’t learn. But why does personal growth matter? We can still be curious without personal growth. However, we miss half of life and feel unbalanced or that something is missing. Many lie to themselves that they are fine but regret it towards the end.

What is personal growth?

Western culture teaches us to be successful in intellectual and physical fields but the emotional and spiritual ones have taken a back foot. Personal growth is about balancing all these to be the best of ourselves. Without these though, not only are we not at our full potential but we are also out of balance. Some years ago I did advisory work with non-executive directors who have retired from their corporate jobs and take on board level roles. Not one of them wished they’d worked more but all of them regretted not spending more time with their families. Several of them were divorced and / or estranged from their children. By having been more emotionally and spiritually present, they might have made more valuable time with their families.  

I believe my father to be in that category. Sometimes I feel such a wave of sadness that that door is closed. I will never know him nor have a relationship with him. As a narcissist, he can never empathise with me nor make time for his children. And yet, I know he’s suffering too but chooses to ignore it. After all, the chatter in his mind tells him he’s fine and that he should be angry at people around him. They’re clearly wrong and he’s right. Does that sound familiar to anyone?

How do we start our journey of personal growth?

1- Find Your Purpose

This was a weird one for me because I thought I knew what I was doing in life. To become manager x, y, z was obvious to me. But then my world shattered once again and I realised that I was following someone else’s expectations. No wonder I dragged myself to work. Finding your purpose is tough and takes time but it is part of the journey. As one of the starting points, understanding your strengths can be useful and The Strengths Book is a great book that lists strengths as well as what it looks like when you have them.

2- Be Present

Our brains are constantly taking us on a trip to the past or to the future. Learning to take the controls away from our minds and to give ourselves time to pause and not just ‘react’, is all part of our journey of personal growth. This experience of the ‘mind at the controls’ is often referred to as the ‘monkey mind’. By being aware of the present, we become viewers of our minds as they truly are and so greater understanding evolves. We start developing the choice to change and improve. Only by understanding something can we seek to improve it.

A great way to start being more present is to use your senses. A simple exercise is the 5-4-3-2-1 exercise where you list 5 things you can see, 4 things you can feel, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell and 1 that you can taste.

3- Self Awareness – Get Feedback

What are your blind spots? When do you get frustrated? I know it might sound weird but the best tool is writing a journal. We can find the triggers to our anger and strong emotions by writing about our days or even our past and how perhaps we were affected as children. Understanding those stories as adults and writing about our triggers can help us change these emotional reactions today. It’s a process and a good one that can help us see our blind spots. It is also therapeutic and helps give us distance with emotions that can be overwhelming.

4- Accept that the human condition is to suffer

Whether you’ve experienced trauma or not, our minds will regardless ‘suffer’ as our minds are often clouded, or stressed, by what the buddhists call ‘the 5 Hindrances’. These are wanting/desire, not wanting/aversion, restlessness/worry, sleepiness/lethargy, doubt. Part our journey of personal growth is to learn to let them go, not by fighting them, but by acknowledging them and not taking them personally. Over time, they will dissipate. The first step is labelling them and being aware of them, which is where journaling comes in handy. Write about your experiences that day and when you desired something or perhaps you were restless. Start writing and see what happens as the experience guides you.

5- Set Manageable Goals

Our journal helps us understand our triggers and so we can give ourselves small goals. For example, years ago I discovered I was co-dependent with my mother. My goal was to discover what I liked and what I wanted to do with my life. Today, I still struggle with boundaries but I feel free from my mother (up to a point of course). And so I’m working on understanding what my boundaries are. The next goal will be to learn to communicate to establish them, without falling apart… Many have done this before and so I know it’s possible. One day at a time.