Working with the push/pull energy of growth
Feel the resistance and do it anyway.
Never in a hustle muscle kinda way though, right! We’ve come too far together to go back to burnout and disconnection.
Right now all my work seems to be sitting in the discomfort of the both/and space. Early summer must be the season for this. Makes sense. As I look over to the garden beds, I see the green bean seeds pushing up through the soil–yet, also curled in a little. Expansion is a push/pull - it’s a both/and. Can you imagine if the bean seeds felt the resistance at the top of the soil and were like, “Ohhh, that’s hard. No thanks. I’m gonna stay here in the dark.”
Sitting with and moving through the discomfort of growth requires skill and shifting your mindset. Developing these skills and mindset are key parts of building your resilience.
The need for this particular skill of navigating the discomfort of growth is everywhere for me these days. The discomfort of change. The transitional times of life and menopause. The messy middle of teams in orgs. Grief’s ever flowing ebbs and flows. In my climate community work.
I feel this discomfort. It's releasing old beliefs about my body’s capacity for movement and exercise while embracing compassionately my new reality of low bone density and early menopause. It’s not going back to how it was before nor is it a giving up and accepting fragility and defeat. There’s a new way of living emerging - one that is strong AF and also accepting of what’s present. It’s the releasing of the ‘poor me’ or the ‘why me’ stories and the embrace of the ‘hell yea me’ version of how this story goes. I know my mindset is expanding just as I’m needing to shift my habits and routines.
The theme this week in Creative Cocooning is regenerating. In a cocoon, the caterpillar releases into goo (that’s probably the scientific word, right?) while cells start to regenerate into the butterfly or moth image. It’s a relationship of the push/pull of growth. The metaphor here for us in my mind is one of building the practice of how to simultaneously let go of old habits and build new ones. This is the discomfort of learning how to hold the both/and. Creativity is about how to let go of old stuck mindsets and open up to new possibilities sometimes on a daily basis.
With the leaders I’m supporting right now, this discomfort relates to what it means to be a leader right now during THIS moment of time. It feels particularly perfect timing, too, that it coincides with midlife/midcareer, for me anyway. I make that connection because I’m learning that midlife is also about the discomfort of old ways of youth partnering with building new ways for a healthy next chapter. That’s why I’ve written before on how all leadership development needs to include the menopause transition as an intentional harnessing of potential and empowerment.
It’s all a rewiring. It is this shift from surviving to thriving. Surviving feels like burnout, hustle, overing, exhaustion--you know the feelings. Thriving feels purposeful, creative, and communal with regenerative rest that is an active connection. And how you make that shift WHILE the world is on fire with crisis and change!
How are you experiencing the push/pull of growth right now? Do you feel equipped to sit with the discomfort? Do you know how to move through it?