Deliberate Growth

Imagine for a moment that you are twelve months in the future.  You are looking back over your year and relishing in the memories of great vacations, enjoying that new musical instrument you learned to play, read two dozen amazing books, become conversational in a foreign language, and experienced your most successful year ever financially.  While all of these things may seem out of reach, in reality, we dramatically underestimate what we can accomplish were we to deliberately set our mind to it.  A well designed and executed growth plan may not be the ultimate solution, but it can help bring clarity and focus to your goals.  

What is a growth plan?  Just that, a plan to deliberately grow in an aspect (or multiple aspects) of your life.  While your goals may focus on accomplishing, your growth plan focuses on being.  Let’s say, for example, you wanted to increase your net worth by a certain amount.  Your goal may spell out that amount and when you wanted to achieve it by.  Your action plan may have investing strategies and steps to accomplish that goal.  Your growth plan will complement these by helping you become the person who is able to accomplish the goal.  This may include increasing your knowledge and expanding your network.  Maybe the best investing strategy is one that you don’t even know about.  Maybe there are advisors who could help expand your thinking and help you think about an even greater net worth increase.  By adding investing books, attending investing conferences, and joining investing groups, you have just dramatically increased the likelihood of accomplishing your goal.  This is just one example of what a growth plan may look like.

If you have written goals, review them and see if you can spot the opportunities for growth in specific areas.  Many people add books to read, conferences to attend, classes to take, and networks to join to their growth plans.  These are all fantastic places to start.  From there, try thinking outside of the box.  Is there a specific skill you’d like to develop?  Are you looking to gain knowledge about a subject?  Are there things important to your own fulfillment that perhaps you don’t have a specific goal around but would still like to work on?  All of these can be relevant to personal growth.  

Ultimately, there is no right or wrong growth plan.  It is simply the result of a deliberate choice you are making to grow and develop towards becoming the person that can accomplish the goals you desire most.

If you would like more information about this topic or coaching, please feel free to reach out to us at info@differentialcoaching.com.