Your growth is your responsibility

As I spent the weekend in my garden I was reminded of the inspiration derived from seeing something grow. We grow a plant or inspire growth in our children or business, but how much effort do we put into growing ourselves?

The speed and ability at which you are able to grow will most certainly determine your future success. So here are 10 things you need to know!

1. The word ‘growth’ has positive implications so it is mostly used to describe emotional, intellectual and physical increases in scale, capacity and financial measurements.
2. Growth usually falls into two areas: the things around us or ourselves from within.
3. When we grow ourselves, we are also learning how to change.
4. When we grow the things around us, we are growing our community and its resilience.
5. Young people grow fast and in most cases easily, but as we get older this seems to get harder so we must invest more effort to achieve the same growth.
6. Our future happiness, success and prosperity will depend on our personal and our business growth.
7. Growth is easier if you know how, where and why you want to grow.
8. When you are measuring your growth you will most certainly get better results.
9. Growth must be maintained and at some future time, refreshed and nourished with further growth.
10. Growth isn’t necessarily continuous, in fact it can be erratic. That is why measuring progress is critical to staying on track.

The importance of growth is best conveyed by measuring the ability to change and adapt faster than the circumstance. A good example of this is the kiwi, who up until 150 years ago had flourished in NZ. It had become nocturnal, to combat its only predator, the Haast eagle. Being nocturnal and able to blend into its surroundings, the kiwi was very difficult to detect as the eagle relied on its eye sight alone.

However, with the European settlers came stoats, weasels and ferrets and the world the kiwi lived in changed. These animals were fierce predators relying on smell to hunt their prey, but worse than that, they had no natural predators of their own. In the ensuing 150 years, these introduced predators established themselves easily, decimating kiwi numbers as their numbers increased. The kiwi’s ability to grow (change) has not been able to match the changes brought to their environment as a consequence.

There are many examples of species being confronted with change and loosing but those that have been able to grow and adapt faster than the changes in their circumstances have been able to survive.

By observing species that have endured rapid change, we see they have two things in common:

Fragmentation of their populations by migrating and establishing themselves self-sufficiently and independently in many diverse geographical locations. This encourages a natural ability to adapt to a variety of different conditions resulting in increased resilience as well as countering the risk of unsustainable change in a specific location.

Their ability to quickly adapt, comes from their openness to learn, accumulate knowledge and to develop new skills. The act of learning is fueled by an inherent need to experiment and explore, or to meet a multitude of other drivers, the most powerful of all being to survive.

Action you need to take:

You are equipped with everything you could possibly need to continually grow through out your life, however many of us are reactive, only motivated to grow sufficiently to get by. This is short term thinking and will lead to failure. This is true not only for ourselves but for our business and communities. So understand and embrace growth everywhere. If you are in a position to influence others, you can can do them no greater service than to encourage them onto a path of goal-inspired growth.

Speak up on things that matter, the environment is a great place to start. So make a difference and make some changes.