What's your plan for growth?

Achieving personal and professional growth by escaping our

internal bullsh**-bingo.

Bullshit Bingo

Just as my nomadic choice of life is sometimes starting to leave my 32 year-old self panic stricken with questions of “is this it? / what am I doing? / what have I done? / [insert any existential questions your mind randomly shoots at you]”, I can see it starting to form for my peers as well who chose a more conventional way of life. It is easy for any of us to get lost in the bustling daily life of work, travel, family and hobbies. While in our 20s there was a clear path of progress, we were always on a new mission: finishing our education, moving, getting our first jobs and then moving up the corporate latter, finding life partners, buying houses, starting a family. In our early 30s everything slows down. We either have the job we’ve always dreamed of, the partner, the house, the family; or nothing has turned out at all how we imaged.

Furthermore, most of us now finally have a clear sense of self, creating space in our heads for something new to obsess about. We can’t drink like we used to but still try, the ones with small children are often too sleep deprived to think about anything in this direction so they might be exempt. We’ve worked our asses off to arrive at this point, and often not given much thought to the aftermath of having reached “real” adulthood. Did we choose the right partner, the right professional path, the right surroundings, are we stuck in a rut? Having either reached everything we had hoped for, or nowhere near, silent panic might start creeping in, and right then and there sleep starts to evade us. Life all of a sudden starts to feel predictable, and while for some that evokes relief, for many, it induces a deep feeling of fear. It runs so deep that we might not even realize; until we are deep in crises-mode and are acting out in the form of intense drinking, over the top physical training or extreme spending and obsessing about anything that keeps our mind from questioning ourselves. Because that part is scary as hell.

In addition, the changing times of work and technology can make life seem overwhelming. First of all technology has killed the 9-5 even though organizations still try to cling onto that past reality. Second, social media makes it look like everyone else is happy and perfect and has their -ish together; when in reality the perfectly arranged snapshots only display one sliver of our multifaceted lives. Don’t get me wrong, I think that’s perfectly fine (because who wants to share the bad and the ugly with the world) – but despite our egos attempt to make us believe our individual battles are unique, the struggle of life is global and real and does not bypass gender, race or class. We just tend to forget that.

As someone who has done all the things, all the different activities and workbooks and exercises (along with more bottles of wine than I would like to admit) I find it all boils down to the following:

Figuring out where you need to grow

1. Sit down in a space where you feel comfortable with a pen and paper. Close your eyes, breathe deep. Envision yourself sometime in the future, whatever comes to mind (next month, next year, next decade, in 50 years). Don’t get lost in the details of “I don’t see myself in different scenarios”; be honest with what you see and run with it. Take a close look at (1) where you are, (2) how you feel, (3) who you are with and (4) what you are doing, (5) any other valuable points relevant to you. Stay there for as long as it feels right. Set a timer for 5 minutes if that helps.

2. Open your eyes and write down what you saw (points 1-5)

3. Write down your current situation (points 1-5)

4. For each point write down the big thing that needs to happen to bridge the gap between future self and current self

5. Examine and arrange the points in order of importance, pick 1, max 3 things to focus on now. Key is not to overwhelm ourselves with unreachable goals and to think that we have to do it all right now. Make the pick and revisit the rest later. The important thing is to continually take a step forward.

Creating your plan of growth

1. List, list, list: Write down the item on top of your list on top of a new page. Now write down all the tiniest steps you need to take and activities you need to accomplish to get there. Usually when we look at a goal as a whole it seems lightyears away from being achievable, we think the to do list to get there has at least 8,000 impossible tasks. In reality it is usually not that long and most of the steps are not that difficult. Break it down to its smallest steps. One of my most intense and annoying (read: best) teachers at grad school was a real slap-in-the-face kind of character; fact was he slapped around with a lot of truth. His main message was: list, list, list, group, group, group. All day everyday just list, list, list, group, group, group. As annoying and tough as it was at the time, it is one of the truest and best lessons in business and life I have ever gotten. What that means is: write down every single thing that comes to mind that you need to do to reach that goal. Don’t think, just write it all down.

2. Group, group, group: Once you have your long (or not so long) list, you will see different topics across the items. Now group items together per topic. Depending on your goals and tasks you will find that it makes more sense for some than others. Always look at it with the mindset that you are doing this to ease the execution of your plan; to get control over your list and to simplify it. Our minds tend to overcomplicate things in order to excuse inaction, therefore it is important that we take proactive measures to avoid our internal bullshit-bingo.

3. Now as we move from planning and strategizing into doing, things get more individualistic. The focus must always be on doing, and not necessarily on the “how”. You like to just have a list to check things off? Then start doing and crossing things off. You are a procrastinator and tend to create anxiety around executing? Then start with something easy and reward yourself along the way; focus on only one thing at a time and not the whole list. You’d like to take a whole day every two weeks or once a month to dive into action? Do exactly that! You’d like to take 20 minutes daily to slowly but surely reach your goal? Perfect! Be honest with what gets your juices flowing and run with it. If its not working, change! As a complete nerd on the subject, I have gone from heavy planning into no planning into now taking every day as I feel and act accordingly. My current areas of growth that I am working on is learning Chinese and writing. What works for me now is to mark 30 min every day for Chinese and 30 min for writing. There are weeks where I feel I don’t have the time (and I am lost in my own bullshit-bingo, because let’s be honest that’s a place we all sometimes lose ourselves in), and then I try at least 10 minutes per day. Some days or even weeks and months I am completely lost in the loop, I don’t move forwards at all, but I have learned that it is more productive to leave those days behind and start a day fresh, rather than wasting even more time in negative self-talk over the time that has passed.

The secret is to be completely honest with yourself, and that is easier said than done. Avoid giving yourself excuses and reasons for why you are where you are. That’s a whole other subject to dive into and in general I think there is a lot to be said for accepting ourselves and our situations with love, respect and compassion. But you can’t move forward if you are stuck in the story of why you are where you are. We all have our reasons; we are all doing our best one way or the other. In order to move forward, we must accept ourselves for who and where we are today. Then we can fully move full speed ahead.

You don’t have the career that you wished for, the relationship, the body or level of happiness that deep down you know is possible? Or you do have it all and feel like you’re in a rut? Either way, there is no time like now to start. There will never be a good time, it will never get easier and for Pete’s sake, resist the dialogue of “When X happens, then I will [insert any goal that you have been creatively avoiding for years and should probably be removed from your goal list altogether].

Björg Finnbogadóttir is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for personal and professional development. She is the co-founder of Where The Great Go, with which she is on a mission to empower women around the world to take charge of their entrepreneurial journeys.