You cannot force growth
“You cannot force growth, you can only encourage it.”
A harsher version is,
“You can drag a fish onto land, but you can’t make him grow legs and walk.”
In my life, I’ve had many instances, too many instances, of people trying to force me to grow, people trying to force me to change. People trying to force me to confirm to their paradigms.
I never did.
There were also people in my life, very few over the years, who said, “Terry, you don’t have to live like this anymore. When you’re ready to stop, give me a call. Right now, I’m not going to waste any of my time with you.”
When I heard people saying that, it was like, “Yeah, same to you, buddy!”
I only began to make changes in my life when I was just so miserable I wasn’t willing to live that way anymore.
As I become willing to change I didn’t remember the people who gave me lectures and heated advice about how I should be living my life. I remembered the people who said, “When you’re ready, call me.”
Today I try to do the same thing with others. It’s not about giving advice or forcing people to accept my wisdom. It’s just about being me. When you’re ready, I’ll be here.
I wrote the above section a few years ago. Today I am starting to see many of the people who force advice or ideas on me are really insecure people. They were looking at my behavior and judging me to feel better about themselves. The “advice” was just the vocal expression of their judgment.
On the other hand, the people who refused to waste their time with me were making choices. They saw I had nothing to offer them, and moved on. They didn’t need to judge me to feel good about themselves.