The importance of personal growth and development can’t be over stated, especially in an uncertain world. But in the rush to plan everything, you may be missing something vital….

(This article was first posted on my LinkedIn page here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/change-your-life-its-just-like-walking-dog-helen–dillon/)

I’m out with my dog in the early morning; it’s cold and I want to march along.

He has other ideas.

He wants to stop and sniff all the things. Sometimes he wants to go back and sniff something he trotted happily past 6 feet ago. And “OMG rabbits!”.

I’m chilly and I try to tug him along, but that’s not going to work for a whole walk. In fact it’ll make both of us crotchety and sad.

So I surrender to his pace, his way of doing this.

Surrender, of course, isn’t what personal growth is supposed to be about.

It’s supposed to be about vision boards, motivation, affirmations, and re-framing your resistance into submission. Change makes us shiver and we want to march along.

We might even expect to march along. This is the myth of progress. We look back and see our route as a linear progression, a straight flight of steps from there to here. But that’s not how you live it.

Personal development – your development – has its own shape and its own pace.

Yes, you can plan and set milestones and visualise your goals, and SMART-ify everything in sight, …and these things are all valid and helpful. Up to a point.

But when something in you isn’t having it, doesn’t want to, is determined to chase rabbits, you will either have to attempt to drag it along – making both of you crotchety and sad, and getting ever more stuck as it digs its claws in – or you’ll have to surrender to what it needs.

And by extension to what you need, that you didn’t yet know you needed.

Personal development is a journey.

It’s a journey that is most often framed as a quest. There and back again having acquired the dragon’s treasure. This is because, while everyone wants things to be different, no one wants to change. Certainly not to be changed.

Yet, honestly, no quest worth embarking on will end with you just as you were when you started. Personal development is a quest where the journey IS the treasure.

(To an extent you already know this. When you’ve outgrown your life and you feel like burning it all down and starting over, at some level you are aware that what’s required is more than just rearranging the furniture.)

Some of the desire for plans and milestones and perfectly formed goals can be understood as an attempt to maintain the illusion that you won’t need to change.

The truth is: none of these will make the journey unchanged either.

This is also why you are perfectly equipped to start now. Today.

You not only don’t have to wait to be “finished”, or “ready”, it’s better that you don’t. Finished people have fixed ideas. They prefer to march along a straight path.

Personal growth involves sniffing around roots, nipping down to the river to dip your paws, going back to revisit spots that seem particularly interesting, stopping mid-step to gaze into the distance. Marking your territory so you can find your way back to it.

Something in you knows where and how to start. You just need to allow it to lead you.

Scroll down for practical tips on how to make this work for you.

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Allowing some “wiser part” of you to lead you forward can sound a bit haphazard… like how will you be in charge, how will you be safe? How can you trust that you’ll get where you want to be?

Here are my tips for navigating personal growth in an uncertain world:

1. I’m not telling you not to plan. Make your plans, visualise your goals, identify your milestones, then hold them all lightly. Allow planning, visualising, monitoring, and identifying to be supporting processes not leading actors.
2. When things just aren’t changing – you keep repeating the old patterns, be still. (Stop trying to drag yourself forward.) More planning at this stage will just be another expression of the problem. (Many women get stuck right here, sometimes for years.) This is the time to tune in, listen more deeply, let things be as they are, so they can show you how they need to change.
3. Whatever comes in your inner work is the right thing. Because that’s what’s there to be worked with. So if resistance is there, work with that. If shame is there, work with that. Whatever comes is the gateway into what needs to resolve for you to move forward. Every part of you that is part of the problem, holds part of the solution. (Even the most scathing inner critic.) Your task is to gather all that wisdom, hold all of the parts in your larger wiser Self so they can, together, transcend the problem/situation. This is what transformation means.
4. This one is really important. Choose a coach, mentor, or guide who understands you are more than your mindset. Who knows you are not a single minded, single-celled being, but a multiplicity of (often conflicting) identities, processes, parts, and configurations. And one who knows how to help you untangle this.

This is how you not only create the personal growth you want, but also develop your change muscles, your living-fully in the face of uncertainty expertise. Growth will always be needed – not just for now, but later too.

You will, I hope, never be finished.

Follow your wild instincts, mark your territory, sniff out deep roots. Adventure calls.