Truth Bomb Tuesday: Change is tiny kid’s cardigan.
There’s a funny thing that happens when your kids are little.
You accumulate your own favourite outfits for them. They’re almost certainly not the clothes that they want to wear all the time themselves.
But they’re your favourites.
That cute little cardigan. The one piece romper suit. The flared pants. The gorgeous frilly sun-dress.
Just. So. Cute.
And you try to get them into those outfits every opportunity you get. A visit to Grandma’s house. Anzac Day. Mum’s award’s night for Real Estate Industry Professional of the Year.
And then one day, they just don’t fit.
You pull them out for one of those rare occasions, and the arms on the cardigan are suddenly too small. The flares barely cover the calves. The sun-dress won’t go over her head.
And you think something must have gone wrong. Did they shrink in the wash? Has someone cut lengths off for another sewing project?
And then the sad realisation sets in. They don’t fit anymore because the kids have just grown up.
It happened so slowly that you didn’t notice. But over the past 6 months since the last awards night, they just got big.
And now that bittersweet sadness. You will never see that child in that cute little outfit again. And not because you don’t have that outfit anymore. But because that little child is gone.
Seriously I would tear-up with every seasonal clothing cull.
Sigh.
But I’m not here to sell you tissues.
What I want to highlight is the nature of organic growth.
Most things in life and most things in nature don’t grow in sudden bursts and revolutionary lurches.
They grow incrementally. Layer on layer. So slowly that it’s invisible to the naked eye.
But then for some reason, even though this is far-and-away our dominant experience of growth, we still expect our own growth to move in revolutionary leaps.
We don’t want to grow like trees, or even the grape vines that are going bananas round my way at the moment.
We want to explode suddenly out of our shells.
We want to move from having a toxic relationship to money to complete money master in a single week.
We want to move from being buried in debt to having an embarrassment of equity in a single month.
We our debilitating self-doubt to transform into rock-star levels of enabling self-confidence in the time it takes to read a single blog.
But this is not how it works. This is not how any of it works.
A commitment to growth and a commitment to change is a commitment to patience.
And sometimes you just have to trust that even if you can’t see the change happening, if you know that you are sincerely showing up day after day, then change is happening. Slowly. Surely. Steadily.
And one day you’ll wake up and realise that those old clothes you used to wear – the poverty mindset, the self-doubt – you realise that those outfits just don’t fit you anymore.
This is what growth looks like.
DB.