Why People Grow
As someone who has been involved in the development of people and organizations over some thirty years it occurs to me that people grow for three reasons:
• They want to achieve an ambition;
• They are forced into it by crisis;
• It is a natural hunger.
Sometimes all three come together at times of transition and opportunity. Whatever the motivation, growing beyond our comfort zone demands courage, curiosity and risk-taking. We must be able to tolerate the creative tension that is only found at the edge of our learning.
In my view, few people can tolerate this "constant, therapeutic irritation" for long. Most of us prefer automatic pilot and the familar world of the status quo.
Visionmakers, those who are pursuing a journey of heart and meaning, carry a lifelong commitment to learning and growth. There's is not the path of comfort or conformity. Visionmakers prefer to follow the dictates of the heart, the guidance of values and principles and a bias to action.
That is a rare commitment in today's world.
Visionmakers are also vigilant about the false-self system that seeks to keep us preoccupied with our deficiencies and character flaws. Nothing puts us in the ditch faster than patterns of self-sabotage and indulgence in behaviors that undermine our personal power.
The way of the Visionmaker calls us past our vanity, laziness, pride and wilfullness to a new territory where we are asked to sacrifice our stories, reasons and excuses. These relics of an undisciplined life create inertia and keep us from growing beyond our belief systems, into our excellence.
By shaking up our own status quo, we liberate ourselves from the oppression of the past, the limits of our preconceptions. This allows us to see clearly and act impeccably. Such liberation is necessary to the Visionmaker's journey and to the rendez-vous with Destiny.
When our hunger for meaning becomes greater than our addiction to comfort and predictability, a new journey of the heart begins.
© Patrick O’Neill 2010. All rights reserved