The secret to exponential growth.
Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash
A few days ago, I was put to task reviewing my entire life and picking out a few major phases.
The purpose of the task was to identify what it was specifically that facilitated some of my largest transformations, and catapulted me into huge growth spurts that ultimately up-leveled me so completely that I got to totally reinvent myself, over and over again.
I often joke that I've lived about 40 lives just since moving to Denmark nine years ago. Unless evoked, I tend to completely forget that there was a time when I was in marching band at the University of Oregon, that I lived in a castle in France when I was 21, or that I spent six years living two blocks from Times Square in New York City in my 20s. And that was just my adult life! So you can probably imagine that conquering this task was no small feat for me.
Shockingly, though, it didn't take me terribly long to come up with the most distilled answer for the most catalyzing aspect of each unique growth spurt:
I asked for help.
Gosh. When I write that down and highlight it to make it bold, it seems so silly. If my 25 year old self had read that, she'd definitely be like "OKAYYYY I ASK FOR HELP ALL THE TIME."
But here's the thing. I'm not talking about the martyred way of asking for help where you sort of implore people to help you in a transactional way after you've already done something for them.
Or the convincing way you can not ask for help by overdoing it always and making other people who don't work as hard feel bad and then volunteer to help you without you having to ask.
I'm also not talking about the sort of asking for help that is begging someone to rescue you because you feel so helpless and just...can't...seem...to...carry...yourself...any...longer.
There is a unique flavor of asking for help here that is full of so much power precisely because it's shrouded in vulnerability and humility.
When you're facing the unknown, and you know that the only way to the other side is being willing to say to yourself "I no longer need to know. I no longer need to be right." then you know you're on the right track.
Over the years, my ability to soften and ask people in my community for help, to find mentors, coaches, counselors, teachers, gurus, and healers to guide me straight into the mystery with my full sovereignty, and most powerfully, to ask my ancestors, god, trees, the earth, to help show me the way, has singularly been one of the most transformative experiences of my life.
I honestly still am astonished by it, even today. And maybe you'll buy it and maybe you won't. I honestly have no proof to offer you other than my own life and the story of how I did it. But if I told you that there is a whole team of both visible and invisible beings just waiting for you to ask for help before offering themselves completely to you, would you believe me?
Because one other really important thing that has directly contributed to my growth is my willingness to believe in things long before having any evidence of them actually existing.
;)