What Does Progress Look Like?

We live in a culture obsessed with progress. The cultural messaging and conditioning train us to believe that we should always be growing.

Some examples of prevalent beliefs around this include:

• Business revenue should always be going up.
• The economy should continually expand.
• We should be able to lift heavier weights or run faster and farther.
• Your list should keep growing.
• Your circle of friends should keep expanding.

In contrast to this conditioning, consider that in the human body, unrestrained growth is called cancer and we seek to eradicate it.

So what does healthy growth look like? What does progress look like?

We don’t always know what we are looking for and we don’t always recognize it when we see it.

Progress isn’t linear. Sometimes progress looks like falling backward or letting go of something.

When you’re storing photos and documents in the cloud, you can get more storage space.

Our energy doesn’t work that way.

We don’t have unlimited energetic capacity to hold onto things. If we are always adding and never taking away then our lives will become bloated.

What seems, in this moment, like a setback, may in fact be a sign of progress. Maybe that setback is clearing you out for something better.