Episode 92 – GROW Recap
This episode is my summary and takeaways from the GROW episodes in MARCH
The Know, Love, Grow series is all about how you spiral up, and grow in your own life, and in turn, how that carries over into your relationships with your family members. The greatest influence you can have on others is to live your life in such a way that shows them what is possible. You communicate volumes just by the way you are being in the world. This doesn’t require you to say anything. If you want to have a positive influence on your family, look at who you are being in those relationships first. The Know, Love, Grow series is designed specifically to help you go through this process.
My Take Aways:
2:50 – Growth isn’t supposed to be easy, but it also doesn’t have to be hard
6:00 – Hating ourselves better doesn’t work
7:50 – Avoiding hard things isn’t growth
9:25 – Growth doesn’t just happen because you get older – it happens because you choose to make it happen.
11:15 – Growth doesn’t mean doing more
13:10 – You need to have a way to remind Yourself of what you’re doing and why you’re doing it
14:25 – There is no magic place you’re trying to get to
Start using the Know, Love, Grow process for yourself by downloading my free trainings:
Download my free pdf worksheet with 30 journaling questions to begin to know yourself better:
When you begin to discover new things about yourself and know yourself better, this has the tendency to bring up some hard emotions and one of the biggest ones is shame. At it’s core, shame says to us, “There’s something wrong with me.”
We easily get stuck in thinking there is something wrong with us, and when we get stuck there, we can’t access the very thing we need to grow.
To help you work through any shame you may be experiencing, download this free worksheet: Download here
One of the most important ways you can grow is to grow emotionally and develop emotional maturity. Use this worksheet to help you begin learning to apply emotional maturity in your own life: Download here
Full Transcript
We all want to grow and improve in our lives. But we get stuck repeating the same situations and relationship issues over and over again. The KNOW, LOVE GROW Model from Aimee Gianni can help us see why we’re getting stuck and where we’re getting stuck. March is all about GROW in the KNOW, LOVE GROW Model.
And I invite you to go back and listen to all the episodes in January where it was about KNOW, and February where it was all about LOVE. And the episodes in March where it has been all about GROW.
You’re bound to find at least a few and maybe more than a few episodes that resonate with you, and help you to see what you’ve been missing. And while you’re at it, make sure you download all three of the free trainings that go along with this series, you’ll find links to those in the show notes.
And those trainings will help you to begin applying this work in your own life.
Okay, so here we are at the end of growth month. In fact, we’re almost at the end of the entire series KNOW, LOVE, GROW. I hope you have loved listening as much as I have loved doing it. I have found that I have worked moved deeper into this own work through my going through this journey the last three months in diving into the know the love and the grow. So I hope you have also found value here for yourselves.
Now this is my recap of the Grow month. And these are just my takeaways, the things that stood out to me the most. If you have different takeaways than I talk about today, then listen to your own self listen to what your brain and your body tell you is important for you to pay attention to. Because just because you have something that’s different than I did does not mean that you are wrong. It just means that this is what you need to take away from these episodes at this time in your life. So pay attention to that it is important.
I also want to remind you of the free downloads that are still available, you’ll find three downloads, one from January, one from February and one for March in the links to the show notes. So go there and download them while they are still available. Those will help you to apply the things that you’re learning. So easy and so great to learn. But it’s so much harder to apply sometimes. So go to those worksheets, download them, start moving this work out of your head and into your life. That is important. And it’s the harder part.
Okay, so here’s my first takeaway for the month is that growth isn’t supposed to be easy, but it also doesn’t have to be hard. You know, we don’t get to avoid doing hard things, we can have the hard of staying where we are and not growing, and trying to maintain businesses usual, staying the same. Or we can have the hard of working to become someone different. To do things differently. Both of them are hard, we get to choose which hard we embrace and which one we want.
Now I have to tell you, your brain is always going to choose the hard that it knows over the hard that it doesn’t know. So it’s always going to tell you that growing and changing things is not what you want to do. That’s why it’s so difficult to try to change a habit or the way of doing something because our brain will default to choose the known over the unknown.
And anytime we’re growing and trying to change and do something different. That is an unknown to our brain. So it will purposefully tell you to keep things the same. It’s good for us just to know that that’s what our brains do. It doesn’t mean that we have to listen to it. But that’s the default of our brain. Now growth doesn’t have to be hard.
Think of the ways that you are just growing every day that you probably don’t even pay attention to or acknowledge to yourself. Like maybe you just take five minutes and you just sit still. You just check in with yourself and let yourself breathe and take a break. Maybe you are wonderful at finding something to be grateful for at the end of the day. Maybe you have learned to pause before you react. And you say something that you’ll later regret. Maybe you just did it once today. That is growth. Maybe you were having a hard day but you found the energy to smile at someone else that was also having a hard day All of these things are showing growth in you.
But we often overlook the small ways that we are promoting our own growth. Because our brains will only want to notice the big things that we’re doing, or the big things that we aren’t doing. And our brain is going to tell us that we should be farther along than we are. And that is always a shame inducing that you should be different, you should be farther.
We don’t acknowledge that the little things that we do every day are much more important indicators of personal growth is little things add up over time, just like compound interest. That is what determines the true course of our lives are the little things that we do every day, there’s so much more important than the big things, but we often just gloss over them and never even notice them.
My next takeaway is that hating ourselves better does not work. So when we beat ourselves up, and we tell ourselves that we are not good enough, or that we have failed, and we think that that will motivate us to do better and to be better, it actually has the opposite effect. When we tell ourselves that we aren’t good enough or skinny enough, or smart enough, or pretty enough, or anything else enough, we are shaming ourselves into taking action.
And we will go one of two ways, we might get really motivated in the short term to go all out and change. And we probably burn ourselves out before we reach our goal. But if we don’t burn out before we reach that goal, maybe we achieve it, but we actually don’t feel any better about ourselves. Because it was really never about the goal in the first place. It was about the relationship that we have with ourselves. So we still feel like we’re not enough.
The second thing that we do when we try to shame ourselves into being better is we feel so bad, that we then hide from others and we hide from ourselves and we feel even worse. And we see a lot of buffering activity going on. And even more shutting down. Neither of these things work to help us be better. Neither of these things help us to grow.
So what does work, being kind to ourselves, and growing from an identity of I’m already good enough right now. Growth from abundance, instead of growth from scarcity, super important in the experience that you have as you’re growing because hating yourself better does not work.
Takeaway number three, avoiding hard things is not growing. You can face hard things, or you can push them away and sweep them under the rug and move on and pretend that they’re not there. do that long enough and enough times sweeping something under the rug. And pretty soon you have a really big pile under that rug and you’re going to start tripping over it in one way or another. Sometimes that tripping over shows up in your health.
Have you read the book, The Body Keeps the Score. It’s an excellent book. And I recommend everybody read it. But it really tells us that the things that we are not addressing in our life will come back. And many times they come back in our health challenges, it’s really important for us to take care of the things that we need to take care of, and not avoid them. You’re also going to see yourself trip over this big pile under the rug, in your relationships with others, your relationship with yourself and your relationship with others.
And when you clean up your own side of the street, when you clean up what’s going on inside of you. You see things more clearly. Because if your side of the street is really messy and cluttered, you’re going to have a distorted view that will show up in how you show up with the way you talk to yourself and the way that you show up in your relationships with other people.
Takeaway number four, growth doesn’t just happen because you get older it happens because you choose to make it happen. Now if you want to get, let’s say better at expressing yourself and talking about hard things, you don’t get better at it by not doing it. You get better at it by giving yourself opportunities to express yourself and to talk through hard things. As much as you hate it and don’t want to do it. You get better by doing if you want a better relationship with your spouse else but you’re waiting for them to change. So that the relationship can be better. You’re not cleaning up your own side of the street and looking at your own contribution and their relationship. And sometimes your contribution is not expressing what you need from the other person. Or maybe not expressing and setting appropriate boundaries with this other person.
If you have a child who has left the church, and it’s affecting your relationship with them, that relationship doesn’t improve by you doing things the way you’ve always done them, it improves because you start working on yourself, and how you are acting and reacting in that relationship. You know, sometimes this very situation is one of the hardest to work on. Because we are so stuck in thinking in this mindset of, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. That we actually block our own ability to see ways that we can have a positive influence.
So if you want to grow, it’s not going to automatically happen. It happens because you choose to make it happen, and you choose to do something differently.
Next takeaway, growing does not mean doing more, I know that some people are going to be looking at these grow episodes and be thinking, My life is so busy already, I don’t have time to add this in. I’m going to tell you, it does not require you to add anything in, it does not take more time. And it doesn’t have to take more energy. In fact, sometimes growing is doing less, especially if you’ve been caught up in the busyness culture that we live in. growth can be cutting things out of your life, and doing less, it can be spending a few minutes in stillness every day.
It does not require you to add one more thing. But sometimes it does require you to really get very focused on what is important. And in times of great stress or difficult trials, it can be very necessary to pull back and to not do more. That’s not the time to tackle a big goal or a project. It’s a time to get really dialed in on the most important basics in your life. The really important things in those really difficult times come into much more clear focus about where you should be spending your time and your efforts and your energy.
You know, what’s really interesting is that even though at these times in my life, I have found myself doing things less in if somebody was watching me, looking at me from the outside, they would they would say I was doing less. But at those times, I’m doing a lot of inward work. And because of that I have noticed those are my biggest times of growth. When I’m doing less, not more.
Next takeaway, we have to remind ourselves of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, we need to have a way to do that. Growth, and another synonym for that might be called to change. And anytime we’re asking ourselves to change something about ourselves, we are going to get pushback from our brains. Sometimes that pushback is really loud. And it’s really insistent when you’re working towards changing something, and it seems like everything’s going wrong. And your brain is telling you, we should never have started this in the first place. Let’s just shut it down. That’s hard. And you need to remember why you started in the first place.
So if you write down your goal, and you read it to yourself every single day, that helps you to remember why you started in the first place. You know, if you don’t write it down, it’s really easy to forget. And it’s easy to actually talk yourself out of doing something because it wasn’t ever real in the first place. So write it down, look at it every day.
Next takeaway, there is no magic place that you are trying to get to. You’re gonna go through this KNOW, LOVE, GROW process. And then you’re gonna get to a place where I feel so good about myself and my life. And I have grown so much. And then something else is going to come along and it’s going to challenge you. You’ll go through the whole process all over again. And if we’re really honest with ourselves, we are always in a KNOW, LOVE, GROW process process with at least one aspect of our lives and more likely several different aspects of our life at the same time.
There is not anything better out there than you are. Right here where you are, it’s just different. You’ll still be a human being, and you’ll still have human thoughts and human emotions. And that is not going to change. But you will be different as you go through difficult things.
The more time you go, the more times you go through this know love grow process, the more you will be able to handle difficult things, you notice that your capacity to handle things is greater, or that you can express yourself more clearly, or that you have are better at handling your own emotions. Or maybe you have more strength mentally and emotionally as you go through difficult times. Those are the things that you’ll notice. It doesn’t mean that there is better than where you are right? Right now, it just means that it’s different.
And you’re not going to be suddenly more worthy or good or a more worthwhile human being after you go through this process, because you are already those things right now. Now, when the way that your life feels to you, will be your greatest indicator of growth. It’s not how your life looks to someone else on the outside.
So allow yourself to find the small signs of life and growth that are so easy to gloss over but they are so very, very important.
I have one more episode in the KNOW, LOVE, GROW series. And that will be coming in just a couple of days.
Be sure to tune in for that episode while I work. I’m going to tie it all together for you. And you’re going to see how this no love girl model is in play all the time. And you’re it has the possibility of being so powerful in your life. So just wait for a couple of days. Go download those free trainings while they’re still available.
And I’ll see you at the end of March for the final episode in this series. Have a great day.
