15 Unique Tips of Growth

Because we need change in order to grow.

For some (obvious) reason, this year more than ever, I’ve been seeing so many posts (social media & outside social media) on how to grow yourself. This is understandable since COVID-19 circumstances had put us into situations where we have no choice but to grow.

This blog post is going to go through 15 unique tips for growth. Why are they unique? Well, here’s the thing.

Growth strategies are not a quick fix. Instead, they are a lifestyle change. Lifestyle change can get overwhelming and challenging but when it comes to growth, it doesn’t have to be. Most times, it’s just a simple mindset shift or a perspective to change.

You’ll learn of these tips for growth and how you can easily implement them in your life. This post is pretty much for everyone who wants to keep growing. Definitely read my past blog posts on growth habits and 7 fun steps to level up your life. You can definitely read these after reading this one!

In the meantime, I’m curious, what is one thing you have done that have led to your growth? I would love to know!

Let’s dive into these tips!

1 – Have Daily Intentions

Setting daily intentions is a good small way to grow yourself. Instead of just mindlessly going through your day, set your day with an intention. What do you intend to do today?

Do you intend to start becoming the person you want to be today? Do you intend to add more gratitude into your day today? Do you intend to be present in every moment today?

Because the truth about growth is that it doesn’t just happen. It’s not going to automatically be given to you. That’s why, you have to be the one that’s proactive and intend to do it. You can’t get growth overnight, but you can start setting daily intentions that will lead to that growth today.

2 – Have Self-Awareness

Being self-aware means knowing who you are and what you’re doing. Without self-awareness, we’ll also be mindlessly going through our days with no intention.

We need self-awareness for two main things.

The first is daily self-awareness on what we’re doing. Like with having daily intentions, each day we know what we are going to do. Being self-awareness daily includes being aware about our habits (the good & the bad), our thoughts (what we constantly think to ourselves), and what we’re doing every hour of the day. Without self-awareness, we won’t be able to know where to start when it comes to our growth journey.

The second thing we need for self-awareness is when it comes to what you want to do in your life. The only person who knows what they want to do is you. Even if you don’t 100% know what you want to do, you can at least be self-awareness of the skills and talents you already have. You can still also rule out the things you don’t want to do. Regardless, you need self-awareness to know all of this.

3 – See Value in Yourself

One quote that I really love when it comes to personal development is this “Personal development is the belief that you are worth the effort, time, and energy needed to develop yourself” – Denis Waitley.

I love this quote because it sums up growth and personal development in one line. It makes sense because in order to grow, you need to first see the value in yourself. And the first step to seeing value in yourself, is actually believing that you’re worth the effort, time, and energy needed to grow yourself (yes I paraphrased that quote).

Then, you can start thinking of your best personal qualities, use good self-talk, and also practice self-love. Those are little steps you can take to see the value in yourself!

4 – Do Regular Reflection

I once heard from someone that in order to improve in anything, reflection is crucial.

Without reflection, we lack self-awareness on what we’re doing good and what we need improvement on. But we need those two things to know what to do next. We need to know them in order to figure out what we should do instead, or what we should keep doing.

And it’s important that we do reflection regularly. When it comes to professional life (study, work, business), we should aim for at least once a week. During that week, we reflect on what we did right and what we could improve on. Then from there, we can revise our current strategy based on our reflection and keep improving.

With personal growth, having daily reflections is good (morning & night). But if it’s too overwhelming at the start, you can start with weekly as well. During my weekly reflection, I love asking these questions for my growth:

1. What bought me joy this week?
2. What didn’t bring me more joy?
3. What can I do this week to bring me more joy? What won’t I do?

5 – Be Consistent with Your Habits & Systems

It’s not motivation that’s going to keep us going, it’s consistency.

In order to have a high success rate with your goals, you need to remain consistent with your systems. Your systems are the steps and habits that you have decided would bring you closer to your goals. But you’ll only know if the systems you set are effective if you are consistent with it.

It’s also important to be consistent with your habits. In order to successfully build or break a habit is to be consistent.

One reason why consistency may get harder is if you’re trying to start so many new things all at once. If you have so many goals and habits that you want to build/break, it’s important to start them one at a time. If you try to do it all at once, you’re almost guaranteed to break them all at once. And we all know that breaking them all at once can make us lose motivation.

That’s why, the secret to staying motivated is staying consistent.

6 – Have Good Environments

We already know that growth leads to change.

BUT here’s a funny thing to know… in order to grow, you need to change.

Let’s put this in a formula together

Change -> Growth -> Change

And what exactly is the change that you have to do before the growth?

Well it can include the following things:

1. Your current physical environment – is it not very organised or tidy? Are things all over the place? Is this a place you want to be?
2. Changing yourself – when you look in the mirror, do you see the person you want to be? Do you recognise yourself?
3. Changing who you spend time with
4. Changing yourself by challenging yourself
5. Change by focusing on the moment rather than worrying about the past and future.

Just remember that there are certain things in life that you cannot change. Such as when you were born, who your family are, your height, and many more. The only thing you can do is change your perspective.

Growth isn’t about the circumstances that come in your life, it’s the choices you make as a result of them.

7 – Create Systems for your goals

Instead of focusing on your goals, it’s important to focus more on your systems.

In my past blog post, why systems are better than goals, I explained that the goal only has one role… to set the direction. After that, the goal can’t do anything else other than just be something for you to look at and remember.

The real success is in the systems. The systems are the steps and actions you take to bring you closer to your goals. When you focus on your systems, you get to see whether it’s bringing you closer to your goals. If it brings you further away from your goals, or it’s going a bit slow towards your goals, you can revise your system.

You can’t change your goal to get closer to your goal, but you can change your system and how you do things.

8 – Turn Setbacks into the Foundation for Growth

Think about how you usually respond to setbacks.

Let me first say that it’s completely okay to get emotional, upset, and feel down… it’s called being a human! When I recently got laid off my job, I let myself feel those emotions. It’s frustrating and it makes me angry, I let myself feel those emotions.

What’s even more important than letting yourself feel those emotions, is then changing your perspectives on them. Turning those setbacks into the foundation of growth.

Every failure has a lesson and every loss has a lesson. But those events introduces us to ourselves. Meaning that it introduces our attitudes and our mindset. Every time we encounter those experiences, we learn more about ourselves and how we handle things.

We are guaranteed to experience failures, setbacks, and difficulties. While we can’t control those things, we can control if they bring us FORWARD or BACKWARDS.

9 – Grow Yourself through material

Another truth about change in general is it’s also affected by the content you consume. Therefore, one of the important ways to grow is by consuming educational and uplifting material.

This can include books, podcasts, articles, or blog posts on any topic related to self-improvement. The more educational and uplifting content you consume, the more you grow. You can’t grow without learning something.

10 – Challenge Yourself Weekly

Facing challenges are like building muscles. They’re not the most fun experience, and when you’re starting out, it’s not the most comfortable experience as well. But the end of result is that you build the muscles you wanted. It’s the same with facing challenges. They’re not the best experience, but you become a stronger person after that.

With building muscles, the heavier the weights you lift, the stronger you become. With challenges, the higher the difficulty, the stronger you become as a person.

We’re all encouraged to challenge ourselves daily. Understandably, that can get overwhelming and that’s why challenging ourselves weekly can be a good number.

But if at anytime when we’re doing our routines and we’ve lost our stretch and motivation, it’s possibly the time to start challenging yourself more.

11 – Make the Trade Offs

So far, this blog post has been going through the truths about growth. Here’s another one.

Most times, when getting to a place you want to be, you have to sacrifice.

A quote I once heard which represents this greatly is “You have to give up to grow up”.

And that’s true. If you have big goals and dreams, there are things you’ll have to give up. If you want to get into better health, we have to give up the habits that are pulling us back. If you want to have better finances, we have to give up the unnecessary spending that is preventing us from achieving those goals.

We just have to remember, that in the short-term it’s not fun, but our future self in the long-term will thank us later.

12 – Be an Alien

Okay, what exactly do I mean by this?

Being an alien is where you look at the world just like how an alien would when it’s their first time landing on earth. The alien would be curious. They would be curious about the things around them.

A big part of growth is continuously being curious. Unless we plan to go to space anytime soon, we’re in the same place our whole lives… the earth. It’s easy to miss things that are right in front of us when we feel like everything is the same.

That’s why, “being an alien” is a great way to evoke the curiosity in us. We may discover something we never thought of before. We may find a solution to a problem we have never thought of before. But we can’t discover those things unless we are proactive and become curious about what’s around us.

13 – Seek Help

This is quite an obvious tip… but it’s to ask for help.

While most of our growth is our own responsibility, we still need help from other people.

While we should be contented with ourselves, it’s still important to have the support of other people.

I know that I could be pretty stubborn when asking for help sometimes. But when I do, I never regret it.

14 – Expand your growth by trying out new activities

Here’s the best part about growth… the capacity is limitless.

The truth is, no one reaches their “full potential” because we’re always learning and growing every day.

Even if we have mastered one area of our life, there’s a lot of benefit to trying out new activities or looking for new areas to improve. Again, the capacity for growth is limitless.

Try out new hobbies, or discover new passions. You don’t have anything to lose by trying something new.

15 – 1% contribution every day

And one last important reminder and tip for growth is that massive growth doesn’t happen overnight.

Instead, it’s even the smallest 1% contributions you make every day that lead to massive growth in the long-term. That’s the power of the compound effect.

Even though those 1% small changes doesn’t seem significant in the short term, over the long-term you’ll see the difference. So don’t be encouraged when you don’t feel a difference within the first week or month of making a change (such as building a habit or starting a goal). You just need to keep going with those 1% contributions.

Take a SMALL STEP

I definitely suggest that you start implementing these tips one at a time! Pick your favourite tip, and then once you master it, go to the other! In the meantime, here are some small steps that you use TODAY to get started on those tips already. Then once you do those small steps, focus massively on just one!

1. Have Daily Intentions – Set an intention for tomorrow.
2. Have Self-Awareness Daily – List down your current habits and activities.
3. See Value in Yourself – Write down the 5 amazing things about yourself.
4. Do Daily Reflection – Tomorrow evening, reflect on your day’s highlights and learnings.
5. Be consistent with your habits and systems – List down your goals and priorities, and what you’re doing currently to achieve them.
6. Have good environments – Answer this to yourself (because only you know the answer), are you truly content with the environments around you? Answer yes or no.
7. Create Systems for your goals – Pick one goal, and write down a list of steps you need to do to achieve it.
8. Turn setbacks into the foundation for growth – Think of a setback you faced this last month, write down how it could serve as a learning lesson for you.
9. Grow yourself through material – Read a blog from the laurenbarri.com blog and learn something new 😉
10. Challenge yourself weekly – Write down how you can challenge yourself more this week.
11. Make swaps for growth – Write down a bad habit that you currently have, and a replacement habit you can do instead.
12. Learn something new every day (personal growth material) – Again, you can read the laurenbarri.com blog to learn something new too 😉
13. Seek help – Message a friend today.
14. Expand your growth by trying out new activities – List down one activity that you’ve always wanted to try.
15. 1% contribution – Starting today, make those 1% contributions by implementing one of these tips into your life!

Growth is a journey, not a goal

One last reminder I’ll leave you with is that growth is not a destination nor is it the end goal. Instead, growth is just part of your journey. Growth is something that is your choice. You can choose to grow by making those 1% beneficial choices, or you can choose to stay in the same place by not taking action.

So hopefully these tips for growth can help you take those small steps in your growth journey! I even have a book on taking small steps which you can download here! The book is called Small Steps to Progression and it’s all about taking those small steps to improving those areas of your life!

– Lauren 😊

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