Episode 18

Hey there, everybody, it's Rick Lewis with the Follow Through Formula podcast, and this is Episode 18. I want to consider an idea about growth versus productivity, and how you can attract growth into your life instead of drama.

What I've observed with myself is that when I'm ignoring my growth—meaning I'm avoiding moving toward an area of my life where I feel that I could or should be expanding, maturing, or taking more risks—when I'm avoiding those areas, when I am not actively growing in those areas, the space that I'm supposed to be occupying with my growth gets filled with drama instead.

When we do not occupy the space in which our growth is meant to occur, the world fills it with drama.

I'm going to tell you why I think this happens. You might just reflect on your own life and consider if you have this experience. When you’re sitting back and avoiding what matters most, do you have the experience that thing after thing just keeps showing up, one emergency after another, one set of surprise circumstances and pressing needs of other people coming at you after another? Does there seem to be an increase in distractions when you’re already putting something off? 

That’s how it is for me, and this may be the same for you, so see if you resonate with this. The feeling I get is, “Oh my gosh, I was just about to finally get to (the thing I’ve been ignoring or procrastinating about) and I was just about to do this thing and now I'm getting this request from a colleague or from my family member or the government. Now I have to fill out the census form. Now I have to file my tax return. Now, my spouse needs help driving the kids around to things this week that I wasn't planning on doing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Because we're moving into new territory, growing is simply not a comfortable thing to do, and so we delay, procrastinate, ignore the growth opportunities that are in front of us. And then when the emergency or the urgent thing shows up on our plate, unconsciously, it's actually a form of relief. In that moment we have a good excuse for postponing the bottom-line thing that is most important to us once again, because this emergency is happening or someone needs help—it makes our postponement even virtuous. “This person really needs help,” or, “I need to handle this right away!”

We turn our attention away from what’s most important to us in order to handle all these emergencies, internally relieved, but outwardly complaining about the fact that we can't get to the thing that we’re saying we want to do.

Again, I don't know if this resonates with you, but this is how I see this play out in my own mind, in my unconscious—the war between “Yes, I really want to get to things that matter in terms of my growth” and “But it scares me,” so I let myself get distracted by last minute requests and urgent tasks and mini emergencies as a way to relieve the tension between the two.

This podcast and my commitment to recording it each day has been enormously helpful as a reminder to myself that my growth is an absolute priority. I tend to it by engaging the things that are a stretch for me and increasing my capacity and my competence on a daily basis. Now that I’ve been podcasting once a day for over two weeks, there has been so much less distraction in my life. I might say that it’s just a coincidence that fewer distractions are coming along, but in actuality, my focus and my sense of appreciation, and my joy in doing what matters is keeping me focused on my growth. Of course things still come along that others need help with or that might need some immediate attention. But because I am actively engaged in my growth, I have a very clear sense of whether I need to just say no to them, or whether I need to handle whatever it is immediately in the moment.

The difference here is because I know what I'm supposed to be up to. I've got my walking papers for the day, which primarily is to get the podcast recorded and edited and up and available, and to launch the Life Leap course. These are big things that need a lot of my time and energy and attention. Since these things are waiting for me and I'm doing them daily, I have clarity about the other stuff that hits my plate. Instead of taking each thing and turning it over in my hands and looking at it from every which way trying to decide when I'm going to do it in my day, I'm just getting it done, or crossing it off the list entirely.

When something hits my plate, I handle it and move it out of the way because I want to get back to what matters. It’s kind of like being a short order cook. You get your grill going hot first thing and when the orders start coming you get to each one in turn. Once your grill is on, and you’ve used it a lot, it gets really well seasoned. Imagine you’re a line cook in a diner, and you're back there on the grill and the whole restaurant system depends on you processing a whole bunch of orders coming in at once. If I have to stop every time an order comes in, fire up the griddle or the pan, wait for it to heat up, THEN try and cook the order, the whole diner is going to shut down and fail. In a diner, there is one big grill always going. The smaller things can get done quickly because the whole thing is already activated.

That's what it feels like to me when I'm in growth mode. I'm taking steps throughout the day to be in action around the things that matter, so I don’t waste time and attention on things that don’t, and this actually protects my energy, attention, and time so that I can be very productive and efficient and effective with things that hit my plate. That’s what it’s like when I’m in the mode of fully engaging what matters.

I’ve been seeing some articles lately suggesting that right now in these wild, extraordinary times with coronavirus and elections coming up, that we shouldn’t expect to get anything done. This advice is recommending that we give ourselves a break, relax. If you need to spend the day in your pajamas watching Netflix, then just do it. And don't worry about getting anything done because this is not the time to hold yourself to the expectation of getting things accomplished.

And I can understand the perspective of not being self-critical and hard on yourself in a time that feels stressful. But research shows that a lack of growth is a big point of stress for human beings. Human beings need to grow. The famous psychologist Abraham Maslow articulated this idea in his famous Hierarchy of Needs, putting the need to be competent and to self-actualize at the top of the list.

He recognized that the need to grow to a high level of capacity, skill, and mastery in something is actually one of the greatest needs in human life, right up there with shelter and food and sleep.

At the Gallup organization that does polls and surveys about where people stand on various issues, one of their chief scientists did a study of employees in organizations around the world. They found out that one of the most important things to an employee that motivates them to be more engaged at work, to stay in their job and derive meaning from their job, is that they're growing. That somebody in the organization cares about their growth at work and encourages it.

Lack of growth causes a lot of stress. If we think there's nothing we can do right now but  sit back and watch as the world seems like it’s falling apart around us, then we feel that we are less in control of our lives. In contrast, when we're exercising agency over our lives, pursuing those things that we do have an influence over, it can help to mitigate that feeling of being a victim of circumstance and being out of control.

So yes, don't be too hard on yourself. It’s a good time to relax, to recharge, to step back and take stock. But don’t use that idea to ignore the need for growth. We always have to focus on growth because change is the nature of life. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said: “The only thing that is constant is change.” Human beings have to change like everything else. Change is inevitable. And if we don't put ourselves in the director’s seat of the form our change is going to take, then we're going to devolve instead of evolve in our human journey.

Don't put growth aside. Don't indulge the idea that right now is not a good time to grow, because I think that's going to backfire on you. It's going to make you more anxious and more stressed to ignore your growth at this point. Finding small ways to keep taking action toward what matters is a way we can keep that growth edge active and we can protect that for ourselves.

OK, well, I think that covers the idea that popped into my mind this morning.

This has been Episode 18 and I'm back tomorrow for the last few days of my commitment. But I have a sneaking feeling I might be keeping on after the 21 days. We'll see how that goes. But signing off for today. Game on, everybody. Thanks for listening.