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March 28, 2019

Are You Really Open For Growth?

We humans are conditioned to wanting to feel comfortable, know what’s coming, have their routines. We like to be in our comfort zones. And comfort is amazing and essential. At times. At other times, being TOO comfortable hinders our growth and evolution. Resisting change, new perceptions, ideas, concepts, ways of life makes us stuck. Sticking to the old and conventional, simply because “We’ve always done it this way!” makes our evolution stand still. Meeting the world from a place of “I already know everything I need to know” doesn’t actually make the world around us as small as we think but more so ourselves – a fixed mindset and not being open to learning limits ourselves big time, as we don’t give ourselves an opportunity to expand, grow and realise our FULL potential. Because we already know everything, right, so what else could be out there?

On this note I’d love to plug on a concept that Peta Kelly refers to in her book “Earth is Hiring”: Let’s look at the phenomenon of evolution: In the nineteenth century (1856 to be exact) Charles Darwin came up with his natural selection theory of evolution. According to this theory species with the genetic equipment most suitable to their environment will survive, thrive and become dominant over species in the same area with inadequate genetic equipment that hence struggle to survive. This same concept applies to human evolution, we grow with our environment and circumstances.

Peta refers to how every new generation of human beans is born with new genetic equipment to harness our environmental (meaning the whole external world around us) challenges around us at the time, thrive and make changes with what we are given.

That means that our current generation of millennials has differently advanced genetic equipment for us to cope with our environments than the generations a few decades back, because our environment has changed.  A great example is that we these days get fed more information in just one single day than our grandparents during their entire lifetimes. Say whaaat?!

Yep, because we have the world in our hands (smartphones) and even scrolling our Facebook feed, which may contain oh so irrelevant information we don’t even consciously take in, these are still information we are bombarding our minds with and leave it up to our subconscious to process it. This information overload has advanced very quickly with the super fast advancements in technology. It’s not even been 10 years that I had a phone with buttons in my hands paying 29cents for a text message and now we are holding these slick flat devices showing us the whole world within one click. Big book collections of encyclopedias are outdated because we know have all the world’s knowledge combined in google and Wikipedia mobile with us wherever we go and it fits just into the pocket of our jeans. Damn.

The reason young people generally cope better with this technology evolution than the older folks is because we have been born into this: it’s been our direct environment, the given pace when we came down to this earth, so we have had to learn to not only keep up with it but master the pace and flow of this world, to utilise what we got given as a tool for further advancements, instead of being played as a tool by it. The older generations spent most of their lifetimes in different frames, less information, less technology, slower pace, different standards etc. which they’ve got conditioned by and adapted to for most of their lifetimes, hence they have generally a harder time adjusting to the new ways the world is forging, years after they have started their journey on this planet. All I want to say with this is: see how the theory of natural selection comes into play here again?

So let’s come back to attitudes and fixed mind-sets: now that we have recalled how evolution works, we can all agree on that change is always present, growth is always happening and that just because we are resisting it, it doesn’t mean that the rest of the world is playing into our own resistance. After all we are all just tiny parts of a very big picture. Bottom line: The “I already know what I need to know” attitude is outdated. Fact.

Like mentioned above, the times we are living in right now are moving, shifting, changing and evolving so fast. Which means that, if we open ourselves up to taking in new ideas, conceptions and concepts, we have the potential of UNLIMITED growth in a single lifetime, more than ever before in human history. And that requires us to get out of our comfort zones, look around the corner, over the garden fence. If you want growth, go get it. If you want change, go get it. If you want MORE from life, just go and get it but it always is a matter of REACHING OUT TO IT as it won’t be coming to you while your sitting in your bubble bath reading yesterday’s news thinking of how all the old and conventional ways were so much better because we could just do what everyone was doing because we’ve always done it that way.

Our own evolution within this one single life time could be massive. Our potential is limitless. Our opportunities are countless. What it comes down to is our very own courage to believe in ourselves, step out of our comfort zone, say YES to the unknown and blaze our own trail.

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