This journal entry has been open for six weeks.
When I started it, I was between jobs and thought I was ready to write about growth. I wasn’t. My calendar had emptied, and I had plenty of time to think. It was only as I began to feel like myself again that I realised how much I had been carrying through the months leading up to that point.
Now I’m a couple of weeks into a new career, learning an entirely new industry and beginning to feel like I belong. Somewhere between opening this page and returning to it are dozens of conversations, choices and small steps I barely counted while I was taking them.
The title came from something I wrote last year before heading off-grid:
We spend a lot of time measuring growth, but not nearly enough asking: growth into what?
At the time, I wrote that I was carrying questions, not KPIs. I thought I was making space for whatever came next. Looking back, I think I was already questioning how I wanted to measure what came next.
Typical me, asking a question before I knew where it would take me.
The last six weeks have given me more of an answer than I expected. Growth is often the cumulative effect of the choices we barely count while we are making them.
The new job is the easiest change to point to. Many of the choices that carried me there happened much earlier and looked fairly ordinary at the time.
An application. A conversation. Asking for help. Changing my mind. Letting someone remind me of something I had stopped recognising in myself.
There were days during my job search when I could explain my value more easily than I could feel it. I could sit in an interview and talk confidently about the businesses I had grown, the teams I had led and what I could bring next. Then the call would end, the laptop would close and I would have to find that same certainty for myself.
What helped most were the conversations I made time for. Some were with people who had experienced their own career upheavals. Some were with those I had worked alongside. Others were with friends and family who knew when to ask a question and when to leave a little silence around the answer.
I wasn’t always looking for advice. Sometimes I think I just needed enough space to hear myself think.
Those conversations reminded me of strengths and experiences I had stopped counting. Some also became entirely new relationships. People who weren’t in my life before this period began are now people I wouldn’t want to be without.
I couldn’t have planned that part. An ending can carry loss and still create openings. Both things can be true.
After accepting my new role, I had a few days before starting. There was no application to complete, interview to prepare for or decision waiting to be made. For someone who schedules a lot of her life, that much open space felt uncomfortable.
I kept looking for something useful to do with the time. Eventually, I allowed the days to unfold without deciding what they needed to become. That space helped me notice how much had already changed.
Now I’m bringing my experience into a place where I am also a complete beginner. I know how to build relationships, ask useful questions and find my way through complexity. I also spend a reasonable amount of time asking what an acronym means. Both versions of me turn up each morning. Strangely, I like that.
Looking back at my own small steps has made me think about how growth happens at home.
As a mother of teenagers, I sometimes see a possibility for them so clearly that I want to wrap my arms around them, give them a little shake and say, “You can do this. Please just take the first step.”
I want to lend them the evidence I have spent years collecting.
But they are still building their own. They cannot look back across decades and see how one conversation, one brave decision or one seemingly irrelevant choice changed everything.
Maybe their hesitation unsettles me because I recognise parts of myself in it. Maybe I want to hurry them through uncertainty because I know how uncomfortable it is to live there.
Seeing a path for someone doesn’t make the step mine to choose.
I talk a lot about HOPE, Helping Other People Evolve. This season has made me wonder whether I sometimes rush towards Evolve without giving enough thought to Help.
Helping can mean encouragement, questions, standards and creating the right conditions. It can mean showing the people I love what it looks like to try, learn, get something wrong and begin again.
Sometimes helping might also mean sitting on my hands.
I can be close. I can be available. I can keep living the example I hope they notice. I cannot manufacture readiness for someone else or turn my answers into theirs.
Perhaps that is the deeper answer I have found inside this question.
Growth is not always something we recognise while it is happening. Sometimes it becomes visible only when we have enough distance to see how one small choice quietly created the next.
So, growth into what?
Right now, my answer is trust.
Trust that the small choices count before I can prove where they are leading. Trust that everything I have learned can travel with me. Trust that the people I love are building their own evidence.
I don’t want a life that looks successful and quietly consumes me. I want growth that leaves room for work, family, curiosity, friendships, rest and the people who matter.
Six weeks ago, I couldn’t finish this entry because I had not lived the next part yet. I can finish it now, knowing there will be more to understand later.
I know more than I did then.
For today, that feels like enough.
