Growth and change is a fluid process, one that happens in stages, more often than not. Have you experienced that?
For most of us it looks like making great strides, acknowledging the change, basking in it even, and then falling back to ‘business as usual’.
The growth is our new plateau. Our new comfort zone. After a while we get that longing again, that urge. We feel dissatisfied. Or maybe a little confused about our purpose, either personally, in our business, or both.
It feels uncomfortable and we resist it. Our tipping point might start when we are beginning to question ourselves – our strengths, what we’ve actually accomplished.
Questioning ourselves
Sometimes that questioning takes us to a dark place, but I do believe that we’ve gone as far as we can on that particular plateau. Or level and when we’re ‘done’ or have outgrown it, that’s just what it feels like.
And, we cycle through it periodically, hopefully using our knowledge and accumulated experience along the way to realize it’s a phase, it’s normal, it might be uncomfortable, but it’s not forever.
It feels like its forever sometimes, though, doesn’t it? It’s hard to wrap our minds around what’s next and we worry we won’t know. Yet, if you can lean into not knowing, the answers will appear.
Making a Difference
Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term tipping point in his 2000 book:
The Tipping Point, How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.
He describes the ‘tipping point’ as the magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.
I believe the best way to describe it is that it’s really just what it sounds like.
Imagine something balanced on the precipice, something will push it one way or another. It can’t stay there forever, because change brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon. Meaning it is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and services.
Business is changing. I wanted to be on that realm of change, the new trend that is spreading like wildfire. The traditional business practices are going out the window. Old ways of thinking about our businesses and how selling products is already changing the way people throughout the world think about the products and services we sell.
Living my Life
My tipping point came when I realized that the work I was doing was not in alignment and there came the idea to find that true path that I was destined to live, and the work that I was destined to do. Not living my life this way caused struggle, frustration and completion desperation.
I am not talking about just any purpose, but a purpose that is divinely given to us in this lifetime. It doesn’t matter how you think you arrived where you are or under whose direction. The fact remains that each of us has specific talents and gifts that are uniquely coded within our own DNA. Your purpose in this lifetime is to do the thing that you were destined to do.
Falling Off
Sometimes I did resist falling off onto the side of change, but when I reached my tipping point. Was I able to recognize it, leaning into and learning to embrace it. The change has come more easily. Now there is more ease within myself and the momentum is building. Had I listened to what others were doing, I would have fallen off my life’s purpose. I would have kept obtaining goals and building long- term visions in my head, but I would have been going in the absolute wrong direction.
See, if you’re not on purpose, EVERYTHING is off course.
And really, we create the momentum by living, by doing what’s our to do and by stepping back and looking at our behaviors with kindness and understanding and to incorporate the change into our lives willingly, with abandon and ultimate acceptance that this is what the journey is all about.
When you find yourself restless, asking questions, wondering, feeling ill at ease, know you’re at your growth edge and lean in to find YOUR tipping point.
It will take you to that edge to find another path – to live your life’s purpose. Here’s to doing what is uniquely yours to do!