Here’s the kind of situation that tends to move people toward personal growth:

1. When you are in a circumstance that is painful and ongoing.

2. When, while painful, it is not overwhelming.

3. When you care a lot about the situation and/or relationship.

4. And when it’s difficult to escape from.

Leading a business with challenges fits those four quite well. It sure did (and still does) for me.

Growth and discomfort go hand in hand. This is not pleasant news. It’s just the way it works.

The smart (not easy) thing to do in these situations is enter a process of personal growth sooner rather than later.

I’m so fanatically enthusiastic about personal growth I didn’t even realize some people think it all but ends at adolescence. I’ve always expected myself and people I work with to grow regardless of age, and we have.

In the last couple of decades research on neuroplasticity and the evolving self has shown that adults can continue to grow and dramatically change their brains all throughout life.

To me a long adulthood of stagnated growth sounds deeply depressing. Thanks science for the encouraging confirmation. You are never too old to engage in processes that produce growth.

In the real world of daily execution, lots of random nitty-gritty problems come up. Sometimes I laugh at how unlikely they are to ever be covered in a business or leadership book. Don’t get me wrong, I love theory and models. They help a lot. Sometimes the real world is just… different.

A few weeks ago I got a call from one of my managers: “The customer service team is leaving for the day. We think an animal died in the building somewhere, and it smells really bad. People are feeling sick and yeah, they’re leaving.”

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I wasn’t ready for that one. “Umm, ahhh, can we try to figure out where the smell is coming from?”

“A couple of the guys are looking in the crawl space, it’s pretty wet down there and they haven’t been able to find anything so far. We think it might be in the walls.” …

So much of success in business is overcoming the nitty-gritty obstacles — getting the daily work done even when things get in the way. That’s a mixture of expertise, creativity, and sheer persistence.

As a coach, I promise never to forget that those who launch and lead deal with some very un-theoretical stuff. Here’s to all of you who persist and succeed in the real world.

Personal growth is an increase in your ability to respond effectively to what real life dishes out. This shows up in three areas.

What it feels like to be you.

Confident, calm, happy, and clear -vs.- anxious, scattered, depressed, confused.

The quality of your relationships.

Open, honest, clearly-defined, confronting, fulfilling -vs.- stressful, out of balance, inauthentic.

The level of your performance.

Achievement of your goals for projects, business results, personal finances -vs.- stuckness and disappointing results.

That’s the top-level checklist for assessing how you are responding to what real life dishes out. When you grow your self, these areas get better. When you look at one or more of those categories and say “needs improvement”, that’s a good time to engage in a personal growth process.

For those who launch and lead, your growth and/or struggle in all three of these areas show up all over your organization.

When I’m coaching people who launch and lead organizations, we work in three broad areas: Grow Your Self. Grow Your Leadership. Grow Your Business.

So what is that first one, grow your self? That phrase might sound vague or cliché. Here’s what I think personal growth really is.

Real life continuosly confronts us with circumstances and people that we must respond to. Loss. Opportunity. Risk. Intimacy. Hostility. Freedom. Authority. Failure. Success. Change. Personal growth is an increase in our ability to respond effectively to what real life dishes out.

This means increases in both intellectual and emotional ability. It’s change in our brains that affects how we feel, how we think, how we relate to others, and how we make decisions.

It’s increase in our awareness of fear, and a change from automatically reacting to situations the way we always have, to choosing our responses based on our values and goals.

None of us are exempt from real life’s demands. I think life gives all of us a daily dose of good reasons to be interested in personal growth.