The growing pains of personal growth
This started as one article and it soon morphed into another. It became clear that in the previous draft I was focusing on all the symptoms, eventually the insight happened. This was all about growing pains of learning and growing.
These can happen at any stage in life when personal growth occurs. These are hard feelings, uncomfortable with plenty of anxiety and lots of fatigue and frustration. I think it comes from the fact that growth and progress require some amount of change and discipline. But also, a change in mindset — breaking down old thoughts patterns and behaviours and trying to grab onto a new reality. Lacking this reality and the firmness it provides gave a period of disquiet and discord — a period of trying to find a meaningful new base to build on. Time has a habit of helping this progress, but the final state is always a work in progress and in flux. It is a process that just must be dealt with and internalised.
Confusion and facing reality
The world can be confusing; I find it confusing. The more I try to understand the more I feel I do not know. There are many unknown unknowns. I always wonder if there was an unknown unknown unknown — a confused unknown that did not know if it was unknown. This confusion exists in these changing spaces where a new normal has yet to be found. Moreover, so much of life, people, and situations we are not privy to, and ultimately need to make assumptions and judgements, whether consciously or unconsciously. This includes trying to gain insight into the action and motivations of others.
One thing I found is that there are some recurring themes and ideas in life. From a single meeting, I can only use my intuition as a guide. It is not necessarily right — it is not easy to size people up in a single meeting and my gut has often been wrong about a lot of things. However, with multiple meetings and observing behaviours patterns emerge. People begin to show you themselves; I begin to show myself to others.
The point is that these repeated patterns and themes give insight, and this is less confusing. One job may not work out, but when repeatedly occurring gives insights and clues. These repeated outcomes, problems and situations provide more conformational data, useful information. Ask people for feedback and they might nor provide honest feedback; but viewing people’s reactions and interactions with you over time gives repeated patterns and themes. These are the clues and the building blocks of understanding and gaining feedback. However, it takes time and a willingness to figure these out and make sense of them.
Although life may be confusing, over a longer period it does give the evidence and clues that give direction. It is a committed long-term sense-making process. By facing reality, I began to realise that I was not where I wanted to be. That over time persistent patterns and outcomes have occurred and led to where I am today; where I do not want to be. The first and hardest step was to face reality; the acceptance of where I am and what could be happening; why things are going wrong. Is it me? Yes, there is an element of me in every pattern and outcome. There are things that needed to change.
Watching
Observation is key, it gives clues to the world around us. But returning to previous, it is not just an interaction, it is the persistent patterns and themes that need to be observed and decoded for the underlying messages. The mistakes and improvements are in there, I just need to look and see the messages. But could I face what I saw? This was the start of growing pains — facing the truth irrespective of whether I liked it or not. Being face to face with the uncomfortable truth is the first painful step. Crucially, it is having to accept and observe the parts of myself and the interactions that I neither like or want to see. However, it was about getting over myself and letting my ego go, if I wanted to improve my life and my outcomes.
To observe patterns, I need to watch myself; I watched like an unattached external observer — like watching myself through an external lens; like I was someone else. This was very weird and awkward to say the least. I did not like what I saw and started to see why. The interactions with others demonstrated some level of difficulty and bad behaviours. I noted that there were many things I needed to keep under control — and for that I needed discipline.
The watching process provided two useful benefits. As I watched I spent time watching and not talking. I started to listen and observe more in conversations as I tried to understand. This changed the interaction and I could see that learning to keep my mouth shut was a useful skill — not offering comments or opinions and being non-committal could help. Lots of people would go on a lot and I could just take it in. It did improve my relationships. It is useful to just let things flow for social interactions and take as much as possible onboard.
Also, it became clear I could see myself; my attitude and behaviour — specifically bad behaviours — in others. I noticed some aspects of being too like people I did not like and they did not like me. This was not expected. It did however, allow me over time to “get it.” Over time, people and how they behaved became clearer. I noticed the politics of interactions.
Politics and power in interactions became uncomfortable. Seeing my own faults was deeply uncomfortable; seeing the games people play and manipulative actions, changed my attitude in a negative way. As I saw more, the more the growing pains grew; what is seen cannot be unseen; development sets in motion the removal of ignorance; ignorance made things simpler, easier, and less painful. Without knowledge and vision, I could happily continue in in life; but it slowly led to where I did not want to be — it was a great narcotic.
Confusion and the world
The starting point was about seeing; but what is to be done with the sight. What becomes of the life requires action. The examined life is the first change — but it is purely analytical — it resides in my head. What is required is action; making and implementing change in my own life. It is outside my head and in the real world which can highlight my erroneous thinking, but only over time, by giving reliable feedback. So now required action taking and improving my learning with feedback, and making mistakes as I moved forward
This involved starting at the foot of the learning curve — which is painful. Realisation of what we do not know and seeing the mountain that needs to be climbed is hard. It is a steep curve, ramping up the mountain and it does not look like it gets shallower, just more vertical. Personal mountains are frightening — they take time to climb, the path is not clear and the journey not well mapped. There is a trepidation of the uncertainty, the journey, and the outcomes. Will I fall off the cliff, get lost or covered in and avalanche. What are the tools that I need? What do I need to know? How do I find and chart a path?
There is so much low-quality information out there. Google brings back many results, many sites are contradictory, confusing, and unhelpful. Much of the information is unlearned. The quality can be very poor. The internet has a lot of cowboys and cowgirls out there — the snake oil salesman and saleswomen have moved online. To be fair they existed before the internet — the internet just provided the medium for them to multiply and scale. This lack of quality, learning and credibility is at scale.
This is very difficult and challenging to figure out — to understand and implement. Finding and making sense of it was painful- what was true? How do I know it is true? The answer is that it is unlikely to what is and is not exactly true — I do not have an infinite amount of perfect and credible information. All I could do was try and develop my judgement. Try and make the best sense of it I could — by applying critical thinking. Using argument and weighing the basis of evidence to determine its value. I may not know what is true, but hopefully I will make better decisions over time; getting more right than wrong. The long-term consequences are likely to be beneficial — but short-term — it might not be totally revealing.
This was the point; in the short-term I had to be patient, become comfortable with not knowing, potentially not having the truth. Being able to rely on my own judgement the best that it could be and trying to identify and learn from mistakes. Finding ways to get feedback, and accepting that maybe that I could never get certain information and feedback. Being willing to let these issues go and moving to embracing uncertainty. It is about learning that there is comfort in being uncomfortable. The comfort is knowing that I am growing. As I grow, I can be more comfortable but can never outgrow the growing pains. These are all part of the developing life.
Conclusion
I would like to say that life is easy, but the easy life goes nowhere. But through growing comes pain, but it does become bearable over time. Trying to see myself in my own actions with others, I began to understand myself and others. Through critical thinking I began hope that I will make better decision over time. The results if the learning and growing will only become apparent overt time, so patience, discipline, and willingness to learn and grow are required. Not just for one day, but a concerted long-term effort.
I hope this has been some use to you and good luck on your personal journey. Please feel free to leave a comment below.
