The single biggest trait that contributes to your growth.
Let’s not beat around the bush, if you are here just to see the trait, let’s get you in and out. But I would encourage you to read on and really understand how it contributes to growth.
Humility is the single greatest trait to help you learn and grow well.
We are often excited at the prospect of learning something new. We are excellent in identifying new skills we would love to have in our tool belt. We can visualize our completeness and dream about how it may change our life.
Where we fall short however, is being honest with ourselves about where we are starting from. We can see Point B in our mind, the point where we have finally learned and are actively applying our new skill. But Point A can be harder to pin point. Its easy to sit back and say “Yes, I am an absolute beginner”, however authentically accepting that as a starting point is hard for our pride to swallow. We do not like the prospect of what starting at Point A means and how it relates to getting to Point B. We want the skill, without the transition between A to B.
Complete, true humility allows you to effectively plot Point A and accept that risk and failure will be a part of moving to Point B. The movement from Point A to Point B is often stunted by the opposite of Humility, Hubris.
Hubris (Pride), is the single biggest inhibitor of your personal development.
Hubris stunts our growth in two different ways. The first being that it masks our starting point. It allows us to say we are a beginner, but not to humbly accept what that means — that challenge and failure will be a part of the learning process. The second is that it tries to protect our ego by convincing us that failure would be too great a price to pay for achieving something new. The best thing that hubris is good at however, is trying to convince ourselves that we are not prideful.
No one likes to admit that they have a pride problem, but the simple fact is that we are all some degree of prideful. To say otherwise, that you are fully humble, is actually a prideful statement in itself. Pride is rather excellent at disguising itself well. Additionally, our culture loves binary positions, “You are either this or that”. I’m sure you would have no problem quickly categorizing yourself in a number of binary buckets.
However, we are never really wholly prideful, or wholly humble. We are all somewhere in between, on a gradient scale. To be prideful, is to be human.
To approach learning and growth with humility, we have to accept that our pride will attempt to inhibit us. We have to accept that pride affects us all, yourself included. We have to accept both that we are true beginners to something new, and that failure will absolutely be part of the process. Once we truly accept those things, it becomes easier to navigate learning. When failure ultimately comes, we know and understand that it is part of the process. We set aside ego and simply move past the failure in our mind and measure our achieved result against the desired result. We make adjustments, and continue the process anew.
Humility is difficult in practice. I often talk to my students about accepting their ‘newness’ to a given topic and to accept that they will struggle with it. However in my own study, I am often caught feeling inadequate, defeated, and frustrated. Hubris is not necessarily something that can be beat, only identified. However as soon as its spotted, it flees and makes room for humility. To become excellent at humbly approaching learning, you must become excellent at seeing how your own ego is blocking your learning. So when I am caught, I often take a deep breath, think about how well my students move past the challenges they face, and learn from them.
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