Are You Experiencing Tremendous Growth?
Success in business and in life requires growth. To make a better life, you must choose to expand your horizons. You must choose to stretch your mind, your habits, your practices and your life. You must choose to push yourself towards new achievements, rather than simply being complacent and compliant with whatever comes your way.
Know when it’s time for growth
How do you know when it’s time to seek new growth? It’s not always easy. You can find yourself in a constantly busy situation, overwhelmed by the thought of adding in anything new. Yet, when you stop to truly assess your situation, you realize you’re just spinning your wheels. You’re simply treading water.
When things start to go downhill isn’t the best time best time for new growth; at that point, you may have missed the best opportunity to grow.
Growth happens best in progressive cycles. Picking the right moment in the growth cycle to start new growth is essential to success. New growth has the best chance of success just when previous growth is winding down. The cycle works like this:
- Recognition of the need for growth
- Design and implementation of a growth plan
- Experience of growth
- Slowing of growth and recognition of need for further growth
- Design and implementation of new growth plan
In this way, you can experience growth cycles that ebb and flow, but that are uninterrupted by periods of stagnation.
How will you grow today?
Growth can come in many forms, both personal and professional.
Personal growth can include things like entering into a relationship, having a family, learning to give back to your community and individual achievement. The pinnacle of this type of growth could be marriage, the birth of a child, participating in a charitable endeavor or earning an academic degree.
Professional growth can have to do with your personal position or it can relate to the business you work in or for. You might have your sights set on a managerial role in your company, or you might want to increase your business’ bottom line by a specific amount.
Good growth plans require a clear and measurable understanding of what that growth will look like when it’s complete.
Planning for growth
Sometimes growth just happens. Most of the time, however, growth is the product of some serious work. Yes, you could just toss some seeds out your kitchen window and hope for a garden, but chances are pretty slim you’re going to get much. Instead, you have to choose to walk out your door, till a little bit of land, provide the seed some water and nutrients and keep away pests.
If you’re not on a growth trajectory, you must choose to tweak your plan or your behavior. Regular reviews and course corrections are essential to growth. Growth rarely proceeds exactly as you hoped it would in the beginning.
Author Alan Cohen says it this way: “It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.”
Benefits of tremendous growth
An effective growth plan takes into account the results of that growth. There are a number of significant benefits you can expect during a growth phase, including:
- Attracting new clients that especially fit your business model
- Enjoying support of management
- Opening up opportunities for advancement
- Developing professional, marketable skills
- Increasing enjoyment of your work
- An uptick in positive feelings among peers
- Improving of your performance appraisals
These are the kinds of outcomes you can expect during a time of tremendous professional growth. Some of them require additional planning, such as finding ways to handle additional clients, or taking advantage of new opportunities that growth has opened up for you.
Growth hazards
Growth is decidedly good, but there can be some definite negative effects of growth. Understanding what these can be enables you to look out for them and prepare for them.
Here are some of the potential pitfalls that go along with tremendous growth:
- A disregard for employees. Growing businesses can sometimes leave essential employees in the dust if they’re not careful.
- Missed agreements and processes. Tremendous growth can strain a business’ infrastructure. Fast growth can strain your processes and test the limits of your systems.
- A lack of interaction and communication. Success and growth can create a hectic workplace in which confusion reigns. Individuals can be so wrapped up in their own piece of the growth puzzle that they have a hard time making their piece fit in with everyone else’s.
- Poor payscale. Growth can strain a business’ cash flow. In addition, as you start to increase volume, it can be tempting to save on costs wherever you can; unfortunately, that sometimes happens in employee wages.
- A lack of organization. This can impact the ability of your employees to take vacation time, for example. It can create a situation where various moving parts of your business which rely on one another can cause each other to be significantly delayed, creating major efficiency problems.
Most of these potential difficulties can be avoided with proper planning. In some cases, simple awareness of the difficulty can help you to avoid the fallout.
Are you enjoying the journey?
It’s been well said that life is more about the journey than the destination. While that may or not be the case, you still have to live through the journey. Growing pains are normal; however, if growth only causes pain, it’s probably worth reconsidering whether you’re engaging in the right type of growth.
Ultimately, the growth journey is yours to enjoy. How you prepare for and engage with the growth process will, to a large degree, determine whether or not you enjoy it. As Cohen said, life exists in movement, and it is excitement and adventure that is, ultimately, the most secure.
This post created with love by Palm Beach Content Co.