If you look at nature, everything evolves, changes and transmutes.

As part of nature, we too feel our calling towards personal evolution. However, unlike trees or flowers who evolve seemingly unconstrained, our evolutionary process often carries the burden of a lot of mental tension.

In this article, I’ve spoken of why you feel stuck in your career and how to fix that permanently.

Today instead I want to focus more specifically on the necessity of outgrowing your current role or set of circumstances, why it’s so challenging (and painful) and how to tackle the process.

The pair of shoes metaphor

To make sense of this process, I want to use the metaphor: imagine a pair of shoes. Looking back to when you were a kid, you remember the process: one day you realize that your shoes no longer fit you.

And right, they hurt.

You can easily relate that to your career, your business, or any life situation that you’ve started to outgrow. Being there starts to hurt.

However, unlike a pair of shoes that you can simply throw away and replace, it’s not that easy or automatic when it comes to your job, business, country, circle of friends, etc.

Expanding or contracting?

When your pair of shoes no longer fits, you cannot shrink your feet back and this is better for you, because you have no choice but move on and replace the shoes.

But unfortunately, in life and career you can indeed shrink and play smaller. Actually that’s the natural response to an environment that poses constraints on your growth: to shrink back so you can fit in.

When you’re too big for your current situation, when you’re too big a foot for the shoe, obviously you start to feel these pains and lose motivation.

These tensions can come in the form of resistances within your organization, or group of friends or family maybe, so you experience a natural tendency to shrink back.

You can indeed end up in comfort zone, or lowering your standards.

When the situation no longer requires you to step up, if people around you aren’t playing at your level, you get sucked back into a lower level.

There’s always a principle of homeostasis at work: either those around you step up to match you, or their force will pull you down like gravity.

That’s why, as you keep expanding, the resistance gets stronger and so does the pain.

Breaking free of the shoe

The solution is somehow paradoxical. Instead of replacing the shoe, in this metaphor, we imagine that you must to ‘break free’ of the shoe.

It means that your foot must keep growing, in spite of the resistance, to the point where it tears the fabrics of the shoe and breaks free.

How do you do that? By giving your 100% at whatever you’re currently doing.

This is the most difficult part, because whenever we’re not sufficiently challenged or see that our efforts are not being rewarded or appreciated, we just tend to disengage or slip back into comfort.

Also, by giving our 100% you’re just feeling more of that pain because you’re pushing even harder against the edges. So why would you do that?

Trust that if you continuously do more than your role or situation requires, for an extended period of time, you’ll break free of the shoe.

Eventually the person you have become and your level of contribution will be such a mismatch for your set of circumstances and role, that life will take you to the next level.

Outgrow it by factors of 10

What tricks most people in the personal growth journey is that they usually grow a little bit, just feel more of the pains of their current situation (the foot brushes against the edge of the shoe even strongly), don’t see a visible change and conclude that it doesn’t work. So they step back and give up.

Here’s the kicker: if you’re trying to break free of the shoe, you must outgrow it by a factor of 10! Being 10% better than your current environment or what’s being requested of you won’t cut it.

Focus on outgrowing it so much that it becomes impossible for your current set of circumstances to even remotely be a fit for who you are. Make the mismatch so apparent it can’t possibly exist. Become 10X, 20X, 30X  bigger than your role.

Use resistance for growth

If you decide not to settle for your current circumstances and work towards the next level of your evolution, one of the most frustrating consequences is dealing with resistances.

Resistances are a natural defense mechanism of every complex system. Because every system struggles to maintain homeostasis. This happens at every level: when we try to make a personal change, we experience inner resistance. Organizations respond to changes with resistance too. At the political level we also collectively exhibit forms of resistance to change (protests, turmoil etc.).

But think about what is resistance. Resistance is precisely the complement to growth. When you go to gym and want to grow your muscles what do you do? Right, resistance training.

If you want to spur muscle growth you need increased resistance. The more you clash with the current situation the more you’re growing yourself and preparing for the next level. That’s precisely the process. Start to view resistance this way and you’ll be able to eliminate a lot of additional frustration that doesn’t serve you.

Take rest and don’t rush it

After I’ve told you that you should 10X your growth to break free of the shoes, does it mean you’ll have to bang against the edges of that shoe 24/7 until it’s broken?

If you know how muscles grow, you know that exercising all the time is not going to hasten the process, but rather just fatigue you or cause injuries.

The right way is to alternate exercise and rest, without ever dropping off your program. So if you’ve just faced resistance, pain and frustration, stop pushing for a moment. Take some rest, let your muscle grow and recover and then give it another go.

Take rest and don’t rush it, just make sure you always grow and eventually you’ll have your 10X, 20X, 30X leap. Everything in nature has its time.

Keep your eyes on the ball

The last piece of advice is to keep your eyes on the ball. Which means: never forget you’re growing mainly for the sake of growing. Do it with an authentic spirit of contribution and self-improvement.

If you constantly check against the current situation and wonder why something better hasn’t come along yet, or why your circumstances haven’t changed in spite of your efforts, then it’s never going to work.

Only focus sincerely on 10X growth and let life do the rest.

And finally, to help you keep focus on this topic, read this article about why growth – and not results – is the highest purpose in whatever you’re doing.

Also published on Medium.