Here Comes the Sun: Ready for Spring Reset? Three Powerful Ways to Cultivate Personal Growth
April showers bring May flowers. This month’s blog is about setting yourself up for success. Pulling the weeds so that flowers can grow. We are talking about finding your potential and working toward being the best version of yourself.
🌱 Let’s look at three powerful ways to grow personally this season:
Build awareness of your thoughts and surroundings
Redefine success and failure
Reclaim your self-agency
One: Start with Awareness: Your reality is how you perceive your environment
If you haven’t heard David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech “This is Water”, take the time to listen. A quote:
“…that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.”
🌊 Ask Yourself: What “water” are you swimming in that you’ve become blind to?
In the speech, Wallace uses an example of the standard day to day adult life. Get up, go to work, go to the grocery store, inconsiderate commuters, and home again. The grocery store is busy, the traffic is awful, and the cycle starts all over again tomorrow. It’s easy to go on an anger spiral. We think of each of these inconveniences as a barrier to us getting home to have time to relax. The thoughts are so automatic we may not realize that we have a choice to think of something different.
Our thoughts are not facts, you can choose different ones.
Key takeaway: Once you're aware of your thoughts and surroundings, you can change them. That’s step one in personal growth. Wallace calls this “the capital T truth”, you are in charge of your thoughts.
Growth through Adversity
Tupac Shakur wrote:
Did you hear about the rose that grewfrom a crack in the concrete?Proving nature's law is wrong itlearned to walk without having feet.Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams,it learned to breathe fresh air.Long live the rose that grew from concretewhen no one else ever cared.
Personal agency will help us grow and thrive even when you are set up for failure by your environment. Take a listen here. Adam Grant includes this poem in the prologue to his book Hidden Potential.
There is a bit of sorrow here, think of how that rose could have been if it was given the right soil and water. The piece goes on to say, don’t ask why the petals are damaged, of course the rose is scarred, look where it came from. Be more amazed that a rose could grow from concrete, against all odds.
When we get stuck, we can sometimes fall into the learned helplessness trap. We focus on the damage on the rose petals and the cracked concrete instead of things that we can control, like our thoughts and self-agency.
🧠 Insight: Growth starts when we stop swimming blindly in our surroundings and start noticing what’s shaping us.
What is learned helplessness?
This concept was illustrated in an experiment in the 1960s by Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier. They coined the term “learned helplessness” to describe the behavior of dogs that were exposed to electric shock. There were two groups of dogs, one group that could escape the shock and a group that could not.
The dogs that were in a space that they could not escape eventually just lay down in their crates as they continued to get shocked. Meanwhile, there were dogs that were shown how to escape the pain, and they quickly learned how to avoid the shock.
The dogs that had given up on escape were then placed in an easily escapable situation; they didn’t take the exit. They continued to endure the shock because they previously learned they had no self-agency. It was as if they had blinders on and couldn’t see the way out even when they were shown how by the experimenters.
When we only focus on the pain, especially if we have been struggling for a while, it is hard to see anything different, even when the opportunity presents itself.
Two: Redefine Success (and Failure): Mindset Makes the Difference
💡 “Check yo self before you wreck yo self.”
Let’s say you go to the store and pick a packet of sunflower seeds, you plant them, water them, and as they begin to grow you notice that these aren’t sunflowers at all. You have a whole field of giant alliums with big, purple blooms.
So now what? You were expecting this majestic field of yellow and black, and you got a whimsical Who-ville wave of green and purple. You are a Steelers fan on Purple Friday in Baltimore (IYKYK).
If you hang on to the idea that you were supposed to have sunflowers, your allium garden is going to fail. You won’t get any enjoyment from it, and it will fall to the wayside. There is so much potential there, but you let the failure of what it should have been get in the way of what it could be.
This is the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. When something doesn’t go as planned you can be curious about the why or you can beat yourself up that it isn’t right. You can choose to embrace the unexpected and go with the flow. Or you can stand with your arms crossed and frown at your alliums. You are the victim of a mistake in packaging that happened way before the seeds got in your hand.
Fixed mindset: “This didn’t go as planned—I failed.”
Growth mindset: “This didn’t go as planned—what can I learn?”
If we look at our field of flowers with learned optimism, the opposite of learned helplessness, we can see opportunity, growth, and potential. The problem is, as illustrated in the commencement speech from David Foster Wallace, we naturally lean toward helplessness and focus on the negative. We must intentionally practice the opposite to counterbalance our caveman instincts.
Imagine your brain is a muscle. If you want a bigger muscle, you have to put in the reps. Each rep will get you stronger and more practiced at the exercise. So, what do brain muscle reps look like?
It's not all about you
We can’t help but believe that we are the hero of our own story and that the other characters are the villains looking to undermine us every step of the way. We are the victims of unfortunate events that are beyond our control.
Here’s the thing, you have a role in your story, this doesn’t mean that things that happen are your fault, it just means that you are also a character that can shape the outcome of the story. You can choose a different adventure.
Be okay with failure.
When we talk about growth, whether it’s learning a new skill or becoming a better person, we will make mistakes. Being okay with failure will make us better. People who speak more than one language don’t have a language gene, they are okay with practicing and making mistakes and “feeling dumb”.
Babies start talking by making all sorts of babbling nonsense sounds, they don’t feel shame for not saying the words right the first time. Adam Grant writes about this in Hidden Potential. The first chapter, “Creatures of Discomfort: Embracing the Unbearable Awkwardness of Learning” illustrates the armpit sweating, squirmy discomfort of his advice to “embrace, seek, and amplify discomfort”.
Third: Self-Agency will empower you to make change in your life
Pull the weeds so the flowers can grow
My first house had some flower beds in the back yard. The house was built in the 50’s so there were several owners prior to me. One of the owners created some flower beds and I assume that at one point they were quite nice.
By the time I moved in they were completely overgrown with weeds. I learned from a neighbor that the owner had intentionally added some ground cover to add impact, but neglect from subsequent owners had turned this “ground cover” to a tangled up jungle of overgrowth.
With the help of others, we pulled, and rototilled, and raked, and fertilized until they soil could support all sorts of things. There were even some morning glory vines that we trained to go along the fence. I started growing vegetables and herbs, then I switched to perennials and peony bushes. With the proper tools, sweat, and teamwork, we made something beautiful. Those plants would not have grown, if we didn’t pull the weeds first.
Once we have awareness of our barriers in our life, how do we get around them or get rid of them completely?
Filtering out the bullshit is tough work. There will be fails, there will be wrong turns, there will be consequences that you weren’t expecting. Whatever weeds you decide to pull, whatever fertilizer you use, whatever seed you choose to plant, if you do it with intention and awareness, it will not be the wrong choice.
We are going to talk about changing your perspective, being intentional, and being optimistic. Sometimes we think of Spring as soft pastels and gentle baby lambs. Let’s think of it as a re-birth, a re-branding, and an opportunity for growth. 🌸 Here comes the sun—and your next chapter.
Feeling stuck or unsure how to grow from here? Let’s work through it together.
What “weed” are you pulling this spring? Reach out for a free consultation to explore your growth goals.