This week’s theme for a better you is Growth.

I didn’t see it coming and in one instant, all my hopes were shot.

I was in a martial arts tournament when I was a boy.  I worked my way up the ranks and now I was fighting for the big trophy, the one I’d mount with pride on the hood of whatever future car I owned to show everyone.  I was doing well but I got cocky.  I learned my opponent’s patterns and thought I had him all figured out.  Knowing the pattern, I moved in for the kill.  I threw a kick that would have won the match and earned me that big fat trophy.

The only problem was his fist wasn’t where it should have been.

He broke the pattern and countered my kick with one punch that knocked me flat on my back.  Match over.  I learned a very valuable and painful lesson;

Never assume you know everything because you think you’ve seen everything.

That one hurt my jaw, my pride and saved me from drilling holes in the hoods of all my future automobiles.

As much as I hated it, that was a profound moment of Growth.  It moved me from one state of being to another more aware state.  I never made that mistake again.  I made plenty of others but they were also accompanied by growth.  The sum total made me a better martial artist and a better person.

Nothing happens without growth.

It is a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to gaining happiness, success, well being and accomplishment.  It’s the invisible, intangible, didn’t-know-it-was-happening act that brings us closer to what we want or need to be.

The problem is growth hurts.  It takes effort, involves risk and requires sacrifice.  Growth involves learning and worse, changing.  No one really loves change (no matter what they say).  We are creatures of familiarity and comfort.  Even when the familiar sucks, we often choose it because at least we know it.  We don’t know what comes with growth, only that it hurts and will involve losing something like a tooth, pride, or one sock in the process.  Growth is scary and could involve failure. Once you begin, growth follows.  It works no other way.

But to be alive is to grow.  It’s Nature’s little dirty trick;

Time + Experience + Failure + (Success) = Growth, whether you want it or not.

Everyone gets stuck.  Everyone gets afraid.  Everyone aches for something better.  That something lingers, perhaps from childhood, on the back of a dusty shelf in the attic of the mind.  Time to dust it off and strap it on.

The gap between what you are and what you want to be can only be closed by growth.  It comes in painful lessons, in fits and starts and often at the least convenient time.  Just as rain and sun make flowers grow, pain makes us grow.

Let’s not paint this all black.  Growth is not always painful (though it helps impart the lesson very nicely).  If you’re open and willing to make the effort, learn, adapt, risk and change because you know it will all be worth it, that’s growth.  Congratulations, a pain-free lesson.

A better you is always forged in the comfy marshmallow-roasting fire of growth.  Just don’t be the marshmallow.

Step into the sunshine, Beautiful Soul.  Let the rain and the sun as the lessons of life help you grow into the amazing gift you’re meant to be.  Take the risk, let it hurt (but not for long) everything you see in your heart is there so step out into the sun and grow.  Learn something new, embrace the change as it is only unfamiliar for but a moment.  New becomes known, strange becomes familiar, that which you are becomes what which you can be, in time. Have faith that the sun and the rain of growth will never let you down.

Step out from the shade and grow.

 

Tom Serafini is a writer, illustrator, motivator of dreamers and sometime stand-up comedian residing in Brooklyn, New York.  His first illustrated picture book, Ollie Bug and the Icky Sticky Thing From Space, will be funded through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign coming soon.  It’s on the list.