Self-development and growth are important, critical parts of life. You want to be growing in a physical, spiritual, mental, and emotional level as you go through life. Gaining strength, wisdom, and other other good traits like virtue. When a man is not growing his is often stagnating as standing still is something that rarely happens. So it follows how does one know if they’re actually growing or not?
How does one know that the efforts they are putting are bringing back growth, change, and reward of a sort? Well for things like physical development there are obvious measures. For example if you bench 315 and could once only bench 255 then obviously you’ve improved, granted you’re at the same weight and such. Likewise if once you were losing the majority of your fights but now are winning you’re improving (granted that the competition is roughly the same).
And so on and so forth. Physically you can sometimes simply look in the mirror and know if you’re growing or changing in a positive way. But what about the other ways? What about mentally, emotionally, and spiritually? How can you tell if you’re growing in these ways as well (which are even more important than growing physically?
Measuring & Acknowledging Growth
With these traits it can be a bit harder to measure, especially spiritually which is going to be very hard to measure and something that is going to be very personal. Some would say the more “moral” (usually using a false sense of morality) that one becomes the more spiritually one has grown but this is false for reasons that we’ll get into later. But what about mentally and emotionally (these two things are interrelated) how do you know if you’ve grown here?
One thing is to look at your past and see if you still think/feel the same way about things. Journals are great for this. Even for me looking back on the early articles on this site I cringe because of how different I know think. I’ve even considered taking most down before. I can look back on ideologies I once believed in and thought I once thought and shake my head and think “Why did I ever believe such things?”
I can tell that I’ve grown mentally and emotionally since then. But there are other ways. Reactions to stimuli for one. Say that when presented with a certain stimuli saying someone getting in your face, you used to tear up or get uncontrollably angry and end up swinging. But now you can calmly say “Hey relax” but at the same time be ready to deal with it physically if needed. You’ll know then that you’ve grown and changed mentally and emotionally.
Spiritual Growth
But what about spiritual growth? Does becoming more pious or more like a hippy mean that one has grown spiritually? No, not at all in my book. I’d say the more that one becomes what they were destined to be is how one grows spiritually. The more they live out that “song in their heart” so to speak. This could mean becoming more “warlike” in a way (the right way) it doesn’t mean becoming some dork who is “at peace with everything”.
We live in a broken and falling world, being at peace with everything means that one has given up their soul and their balls. So no spiritual growth doesn’t mean becoming what those in the Western world would call “more spiritual” if anything that’s actually the lowest form of spirituality that one can have. But that’s a topic for another time.
The more you live with fire in your heart the more you have spiritually grown. The more that you become who you were meant to become (and figure that out) the more you have spiritually grown. For myself moving from the focuses I once had (money, women, fitness) to things that are higher and more worthy of time (not that those other things don’t have a place, just not the center one) is how I know personally of this growth. But there are other ways.
A Subtle Thing
The thing is you may not know you’re growing until much later. There are few times where it’s obvious and you’ll be given a black and white example of how you’ve grown (though those do come from time to time). The best thing that you can do is constantly work hard, refine, and trust the process (once vetted). You get what you put in, that’s how this life works.
Growth can be subtle and slow and sometimes it’ll seem like you’re taking one step back for every two or three steps forward but that is normal and how things work. Look at what your goals are as well and how they have changed. For example in a few short years for me it’s gone from making X amount of money to finding a way to raise a healthy and happy family in this world. And before that it was even worse. When you put in the work physically, mentally, spiritually, and emotionally is when the growth comes and the growth happens.
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-Charles Sledge
