The Refining Beauty of Painful Growth

It’s easy to say “I’ll do that next month” or “I’ll do that when I have more experience” or “When I have enough followers”. What is “enough” experience, though? Or followers? What type of growth are you seeking?

You won’t experience growth if you don’t push yourself outside of what you thought possible and into the light of incredible opportunity. This push is painful yet beautifully refining. When we stop putting this growth off until tomorrow, we can begin living the life we’re called to; one of service to others through our unique skills and ideas.

Before we can start this growth, though, we need to commit to it.

Commit to Growth

David Goggins, Navy Seal turned author, speaker, and all-around authority on mental toughness has said that your mind will give up when your body still has 40% left to give. While this is typically mentioned in relation to physical endurance, we can use this concept for personal growth as well. This isn’t an easy journey, so we need to get our head and heart straight because before we can grow, we have to commit to seeing it through.

When your mind is ready to give up on a project, tell yourself you’re going to work for just ten more minutes. Or, perhaps even more importantly, when your brain thinks that checking Instagram for the fifth time in an hour is better than working. Tell it to sit down and start working on your project instead of wondering if something major has happened in the world of perfect squares.

By committing to growth and improving your mental toughness, you’ll be better able to lean into the pain often associated with career and personal growth.

Lean Into the Pain

This sounds terrible, but hear me out. By choosing a creative life, you stepped into one filled with expanding your comfort zone and leaning into the fear that comes with sharing your work. When we choose to lean into the pain instead of running in the opposite direction, we have the opportunity to experience far more growth than we could ever see otherwise.

Leaning into painful growth means not giving up when it’s easier to stop than continuing on. It means learning important lessons through scrapes with busted egos and forced humility. When we reflect on times of painful growth, it’s usually with a wince after remembering those moments that may have hurt us in the moment, but have brought us here today.

This is why we need that mental toughness. We’re leaning into the pain of necessary growth, and preparation and focus will help us move through it with grace and humility. It’s definitely not a fun experience, but as long as we learn from it, we’ll leave the situation better off than before.

And, as important as committing to growth and leaning into the pain is, we also need to leave space for rest.

Leave Space for Rest

You’re doing something incredibly hard and gratifying, which means we need to take time to rest. I’m particularly guilty of this. If friends are busy and there’s nothing else to do, I’ll work.

It could be the podcast, updating my website, or working on upcoming personal projects. I feel lazy if I watch more than an episode or two of a show on Netflix, and that Type A in me always feels like I need to be going further and pushing harder to reach my goals.

But I can’t do that if I’m worn down from constantly working. I love having these side projects and sharing with other creatives, but I also need the rest.

And you do, too.

Build in time for rest each week. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s not work or side project related. Work hard, rest hard. Spend time with friends, read a non-self development book, or, gasp, watch four episodes of something on Netflix. Crazy, right?

Remember that rest is not inherently lazy. This hustle-first mentality culture portrays as the only answer isn’t. You can have a completely fulfilling career that doesn’t involve working every waking minute. I promise.

Know that you aren’t alone in this. I’m working on the rest vs. laziness belief as well, partially by reinstituting my one completely “off” day. As a believer, I appreciate and respect the idea of a day of rest and reflection. Too often, though, I don’t consider my podcast as “work” because I enjoy it. I view it as a fun thing I get to do.

It is still work, though. So I’m going to focus on using my time more efficiently on the other six days of the week so I can truly rest each week. The mental strain of always thinking two steps ahead and trying to remember every piece of life will wear on you, and rest, however forced it may be, will help you recover.

Get your spouse, partner, or friends to keep you accountable. This change helps improve your self-control, which will also benefit other areas of your life.

Work with a Dual-Focus

When we commit to growth, we need to balance a dual-focus. We have our ultimate goal, which keeps us going when we have no idea where the next stop on the path is, and it will set our souls on fire in our career. We do, though, also have to focus on the path in front of us because looking too far ahead can be paralyzing. There’s so much to consider and much of it is undecided.

(If you want to hear more about the phrase, “set your soul on fire”, head to episode 11, “Fearless in the Pursuit”.)

This dual-focus is a tricky thing to begin focusing on. We tend to be either big picture or detail-oriented people, but we need to develop both skills in order to achieve our goals. There will always be an opportunity to use your strengths, but we also need to develop our weaknesses so that we can continue to grow personally and professionally.

Looking at our ultimate goal is essential because it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of our tasks and lose hope in our eventual success. One of the best ways to remember this goal is to set aside time to write your mission and positioning statements.

Your mission statement is a way to concisely state your goals as they relate to your overall life mission. It’s usual for companies to have a mission statement, but we need personal mission statements, too.

A positioning statement shares how your work fills a customer need in a way that other creatives and companies don’t. Another way to think about it is finding your niche. Your niche is how you will accomplish your mission statement. Again, many companies have positioning statements, but this is an incredibly valuable way to solidify how you want to move forward in your career.

Create and share your mission statement to the world, proclaiming that you’re ready to continue on the creative life you’ve been called to.

I highly encourage you to set aside an hour this week to begin writing these for yourself. They don’t have to be perfect right away, but the act of creating these statements will help you discover who you are, who you want to be, where you want to go, and how you want to help others.

The other piece of this dual-focus is looking at the path just ahead of us, which includes focusing on the tasks we can do today to help us reach our goals. These are typically larger tasks broken into smaller ones so there’s less of a chance we get lost in the sea of unknowns with waves of stress and anxiety crashing over us.

Some examples of this detail-oriented focus include:

• Buying a domain name.
• Writing your about page.
• Filming one five-minute video.
• Reserving your social profiles.
• Designing quote images for social.

The goal of this is to help heal the fear of uncertainty into a balm that soothes our creative souls by accomplishing needed tasks, even if it’s a task that takes five minutes. Five-minute tasks are just as important as the hour-long strategy sessions.

Now that we’ve reviewed these two ways to focus on our goals, let’s bring it together. If your long-term goal is to help professionals brand themselves with profile videos, then your short-term focus could be researching industries where this need is greatest, creating a list of professionals you want to work with, and establishing a workflow.

Picture your long-term goal as the type of career you want, and your short-term goal as the concrete steps you need to take so you can have that career.

I talk fairly often about setting achievable goals, and this is no exception. It’s an opportunity to not only get things done but also to build our confidence as we reach each goal. The better we can serve our immediate needs and our future selves, the more likely we’ll be to reach those goals.

Self-improvement through painful growth is one of the greatest challenges of our creative lives. It’s filled with more questions than answers and isn’t talked about nearly enough. So let’s change that. Create and share your mission statement to the world, proclaiming that you’re ready to continue on the creative life you’ve been called to.

Refine your short-term and long-term goals, break them down into actions that move you forward, and stay pliable enough that the pain of personal growth won’t break you. It really will, as people always say, make you stronger. Just don’t let that strength become a barrier. Let it be a story of grace and trust and belief that you’re living the story you’ve been called to live.

Only one person can live your story, and that person is you.