Hey there. It's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson. In this week's vlog, I want to talk about personal growth and striving to improve and what that looks like. Because in Bright Line Eating®, we really value that a lot. We have an explicit value around meliora, which is Latin for ever better, always improving, always striving to improve. It's about becoming resourced, which is one of the three main themes in my new book, Maintain, that publishes April 21st. It's all about how long-term weight loss maintenance is about becoming devoted, meaning devoted to a plan of eating that you stick with. You're not dieting or on and off again, you're devoted. And then resourced. This is about the personal growth aspect. A lot of people use food as their main coping strategy for life, their main go-to emotional resource. In order to become inner-resourced, we've got to be growing. We've got to be on a path of personal growth work, doing our inner work, always developing tools to deal with life's stressors beyond food. Then the third theme is becoming liberated, free from the food and the weight struggle. We value becoming resourced. We value personal growth in Bright Line Eating. And there is something I've noticed, I guess this is in social media and in the personal growth world said by well-meaning people, there's a way of articulating personal growth and a commitment to it that I think is really flawed. Actually, if you look under the hood, pretty silly and just kind of, I don't know, childlike, infantile, juvenile, not really reflective of what personal growth looks like. I wanted to call it out in this vlog so we could talk about it a little bit, so you can recognize that so that you can have a mature, nuanced, appropriate expectation of what personal growth really looks like so you don't set yourself up with unrealistic expectations.
What am I talking about? I'm talking about these memes that say things like, let every day be better than your last, or strive for continual progress. Or some of them even quantify it. They say, if you get 1% better every day, in 90 days, you'll be 90% better. Look how easy it is, right? I mean, gosh, get 5% better every day. And in a hundred days, be 500% better. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way. Why not? Well, first of all, because real growth is not linear. Now, I used to teach this in developmental psych class. I used to teach lifespan developmental psychology and child developmental psychology. In the infant unit where we talked about newborn babies and the first year of developmental milestones, cognitively, physically, emotionally, etc., I would talk about physical growth and that researchers actually have measured babies' growth and they're shocked to find how non-linear it is. It's not that babies are growing every day, sort of an equal amount to get bigger and bigger and bigger. That's not how it works. Kids aren't doing that either. As a matter of fact, they go long stretches of time without growing at all hardly. Then they grow massively all at once in a short spurt. It's a stair step function, baby's growth is, and kids too. So, when grandma says, "Little Jimmy, oh my gosh, I haven't seen you in two weeks and it looks like you've grown an inch." He may have. That actually is not at all unfeasible that little Jimmy may have grown an inch since two weeks ago when he was last at grandma's house and he might not grow another inch for months. That may have been the two weeks that he grew an inch.
Weight loss happens that way too sometimes. Some weight loss is relatively smooth and steady. And other times weight loss is you lose five pounds in a week and then nothing for a month. This is why in the initial weight loss phase, I think weighing monthly is actually the most conducive to sanity. If you're going to weigh yourself at all, consider weighing yourself monthly just because you're more likely to get an accurate representation of what that weight loss looks like as opposed to weighing every day and then being distraught by the so- called plateaus followed by big losses. Emotional growth is like that too. We find steady states where our days and weeks are pretty predictable, wash, rinse, repeat, for stretches of time. And then suddenly we have epiphanies, things change internally, maybe externally too, maybe externally and then therefore internally. We're suddenly in a phase of rapid intense growth and then we level out and reach a new plateau. The whole notion that we would grow or change 1% or improve 1% every day and then be 90% better in 90 days, it's just not how growth works.
Another aspect of growth is that it actually often feels circular, or maybe to be more precise, like a spiral where you keep coming back to the same themes or the same topics, the same grief, the same challenges with your own way of showing up to life, the same pains, the same abandonment issues, the same struggles in relationships, the same challenges with your natural character and feeling like you wish you could show up a little differently. For me, for example, one of the things I've chronically struggled with is my ego and feeling like I talk too much, I have too big of a presence. I've created a world here in Bright Line Eating where I'm able to talk a lot and it kind of works. But in other settings where it's like a dinner party where the airtime is ideally shared amongst the participants or the people there, I feel like I talk too much. I often will leave a situation like that feeling some amount of shame, like, why did I talk so much? I wish I had tampered that down and heard more from other people and invited other people's voices in it as if it's my job to invite them in, right? But you know what I mean? It's something that I struggle with. I know other people who struggle with the exact opposite of that, of not talking enough, of not bringing their voice into the conversation as much and then walking away from social gatherings, feeling some amount of shame that they wish they spoke up more.
Anyway, we all have our things, whatever they are. If we do our inner work, our issues become kind of like good old Uncle Jim where it's like he might come to Thanksgiving and be obnoxious and he is who he is, but we love him and we invite him every year and he's always welcome and he just is who he is. You develop some amount of acceptance for this family member who, God bless him, he does the best he can, we're sure, or maybe he's not, but we're going to give him some grace anyway. Our own flaws, foibles, challenges can come to feel like that. My point is that sometimes we're not grappling with them. Sometimes we're focusing elsewhere, life is moving along, and then we'll come back around in this like spiral staircase way and that old familiar feeling of grief, abandonment, that aspect of our character that we've struggled with on and off throughout the years will be more acutely felt.
What I believe about these returnings to the same themes is that we're being invited to grow again, to look at it again in light of the distance we've traveled and everything we've learned since the last time, and to go deeper with our growth, with that topic. Some of us have specific areas of challenge that are going to be recurring. If our mom died when we were eight, well, that might be something that we revisit again and again and again throughout our lives. It's not a grief that we're likely to be one and done with. Personal growth in that arena might feel more like a spiral staircase and we're going to keep coming back and revisiting the issue.
Another thing about personal growth, I think is that it's seasonal. It's seasonal. We're not always grappling with stuff and there are definitely times. For example, for me, I have historically had some seasonal affective disorder. That's literally seasonal that in a winter I will likely grapple with some amount of feeling low or feeling a little depressed or feeling a little less energetic, feeling a little less vibrant. My work on that is literally seasonal. Then also just there's seasons of harder work and less hard work. There's seasons of life where if you had kids or have kids, well, that season is really busy. If you work and have kids, oh my gosh, that is a long season of intensity in modern life. That is, a lot of work. But then there's other seasons. There's the seasons before the kids come, there's the seasons after the kids are out of the house that are going to be a lot gentler. There's the season of retirement. So, there's all sorts of seasonality, both short term and in longer stretches. If you're caring for an elderly parent, that could be a season of quite a bit of intensity. Then they pass and then there's a season of grief and then a season of more spaciousness, but that grief, you might circle back around to it again and again. So again, it's not linear, right? There's nothing linear about this stuff.
Some personal growth is contextual, meaning if you are an adult and you're single, but sometimes you date and get into relationships, you might notice that your personal growth work is very contextual, that the seasons of being single on your own, living independently, feel very different in terms of the personal growth work that you're confronted with from the season of dating, which brings up all kinds of boundary issues, insecurities, expectations, attachments, issues of what you're striving for versus not. Ehat you're allowing yourself to wish for versus not. What is reasonable to expect out of other people versus not, versus settling into a relationship with somebody, which brings up its own issues of intimacy and communication and expressing wants and needs and feeling disappointed by somebody else. Everybody's human. Everybody is disappointing when you get close enough to them in some ways. Being in relationship is generally, I think, harder than other aspects, like being single is one thing, but there's just not as much sand in the oyster when you're single, but there's other issues to grapple with there too. Am I going to grow old alone? Are there people to care for me when I have health challenges? Then you're in a relationship. Well, there's another set of challenges. So, these types of growth are contextual depending on the context that you're in. If you're an adult who dates or is going through periods of serial monogamy, you might absolutely find that your main aspects of personal growth are contextual.
The last thing I've noticed is that personal growth is sometimes messy, fraught, disguised. Sometimes we just need to cry every day in the shower, on the floor, in bed, in the kitchen, cry, cry. That stretch of grief, of emotion, it could be hormonal, so it could be seasonal. Perimenopause. It could be a dam that broke that allowed years, maybe decades of pent up childhood grief to come to the surface. And you might be crying every single day thinking, why am I such a hot mess? Good grief. The reality is that might be some of the most profound, fabulous, personal growth you've ever done in your whole life. It just might be disguised to you at that moment. Maybe you need to cry for a year or longer or shorter or what have you. Then that storm cloud eventually will pass and who knows what's on the other side of it, but maybe a rainbow and a sunshine that you haven't ever experienced before because now your emotional channel is finally clear and unblocked for the first time in your life. You might have access to joy on the other side of that, that is of a sort that you have never tapped into before. That personal growth might be messy and fraught and disguised in a way that doesn't reveal itself to you for quite a while. You might be feeling like, "There must be something wrong with me." There's probably nothing wrong with you. You just have a lot of tears that need to come out finally.
I just wanted to share my thoughts on what personal growth really looks like. I've been in the game, rolling up my sleeves, doing the personal growth work for 31 years now. I mean, longer, I guess, because I really went into therapy in seventh grade, so maybe pretty close to my whole life. It's my jam. I love this stuff. And I noticed myself, I don't really get bothered by stuff. I have one pet peeve, which is the word carbs. I hate that word because it makes people afraid to eat apples and bananas when those are not the same thing as pancakes. So, I hate the word carbs. I think I might be developing a little pet peeve against those memes that say, or maybe I just laugh at them that say, "If you just improve by 1% every day in 90 days, you'll be 90% better." I don't know if it's a pet peeve. I think it might just be, maybe it engenders in me a feeling of righteous superiority of like, "I see through that." That's not actually how it goes. Maybe I'll get my ego in check and just breathe and just say, "Well, I've done a lot of personal growth work and if I could improve by 1% every day in a linear fashion for the rest of my life, that would be lovely. But I'm an actual human being traveling an actual path of growth and development." And I got to say, it's pretty fraught, it's pretty messy, it's pretty uneven and it's seasonal, it's contextual, it's circular, it's a spiral staircase, and sometimes it's disguised.
What do I do instead of thinking I'm just going to get a little better every day? I strive to be a really good steward of my journey, of my heart and my soul. I strive to be someone who hears the call of my calling, the cries of my soul and gives it the food that it's looking for, not from the aisles of the supermarket, but like real soul food, whether it's journaling or a little extra time sitting in meditation or a good call with a friend or a session with a therapist or a life coach or some writing with my left hand, my non-dominant hand. Sorry if you're a lefty. My left hand is my non-dominant hand, but some writing with my non-dominant hand to reveal what my right brain is thinking. Try that, if you haven't, some time. It's really powerful. I try to be a good steward of my journey. I try to let what I'm going through be absolutely okay, however it looks and I make sure I'm still in the game of growing and changing and developing. There are times when it feels a little more coasty, cruisy wash, rinse, repeat, and then times when, "Ooh, the fire is there and I am burning up with it and it is time to change and grow, baby." I try to show up to either of those states and do what's called for. It's not linear. Thank goodness, right? If you think of landscapes, linear isn't a particularly attractive feature. Give me mountains, give me S-curve streams, give me rolling hills, give me, I mean, for my taste, give me the Himalayas, give me intense ups and downs. I'd rather, I'd rather, right? Linear is like, okay, well, that's not the most beautiful. I would rather at least a meadow of flowers. Give me something, something, some context, some texture in that landscape. So anyway, those are my rambling thoughts on personal growth. It's not linear, it's contextual, it's beautiful. That's the weekly vlog and I will see you next week.
