Grow the Game®

Chazz Woodson - Words of Wisdom
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Growth and Maturation

Good Monday morning!

One thing I sincerely enjoy about sending out this email each day is that I rarely know who is going to be affected by it. It goes out to athletes and non athletes. It goes out to parents of college students and parents of toddlers. It goes out to high school students and it goes out to graduate students. And then of course, it’s posted and/or forwarded along to people who are not on my list. So each message will resonate differently based on who is reading it. Trying to strike a balance with universal messages is often the trickiest part for me. ONE thing that I have figured out, however, is that my messages must reflect my growth.

I’m not the same person that I was 12 or 13 years ago. And while it’s a more similar picture, I’m not even the same person that I was 4 or 5 years ago. I’ve grown and matured – out of some things, and into others. My messages, both in this email and to the world when I speak or use social media, are probably not the exactly same today as they were a few years ago, and actually may in some ways conflict with my messages (in word or deed) of a few years ago. But growth – whether personal, financial, professional, or societal – is, in and of itself, conflict. It’s a conflict between who we are now, and who we will become. The end result should leave us in a different and better place than we were before. Growth is a positive and beneficial moving on from one thing to the next, otherwise it’s not growth.

Growth and maturation is a good thing. In order for growth to happen, however I think we must understand and accept 3 things.

It doesn’t happen overnight. We can’t rush the process.
Everything we’ve done and experienced in the past brings us to the point where growth is imminent. embrace it.
You’ll know you have grown (in a particular area) when there’s consistency of word and action as it pertains to that area of your life.
Growth happens when it’s time to happen. Not before.

“Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” – C.S. Lewis

Make it a GREAT day and a GREAT week!

Stay blessed.