Personal growth is exhilarating! I love watching my clients leap into a growth goal that gives them butterflies or makes them grin.
Steeping ourselves in growth activities when they involve a BIG stretch to reach a HUGE personal or business goal frequently involves encountering setbacks, too. As we are all so acutely aware, humans cannot learn without an element of failure. The more we fail, the faster we learn. But failure feels bad. Pretending that it doesn’t isn’t worth much.
Our self-help literature tells us that the better we get at failure, the faster we will move forward. Yes and no. We progress faster if we accept the failure as a natural part of our learning process and we boldly inspect each failure inside and out to glean as much as we can from it before we progress to our next failure. In this way, we fail in new and increasingly helpful ways. Each failure allows us to refine our process in a novel way.
We can hate the process or we can accept it as part of the journey. After a few of these road bumps, look around. Who are you now? What have those challenges given you?