Personal growth isn't selfish

I'm not a big fan of the wellness industry. The value-chain seems to be: pay me money and I’ll make you feel good - fast (ten minutes to transform yourself?! Really?!)

Add a charismatic, good-looking person and some vague, lofty-sounding spiritual talk, and you have people feeling wonderful. In and of itself, that’s not a problem – feeling wonderful is....wonderful!

But there are three key issues I have with this.

1. PLEASANT FEELINGS CAN BE MONETISED

The first is that, because emotions make our decisions (yep, the intellect can do all the rational assessment it likes, but our emotions rule the roost by default) if the motive is profit, that wonderful feeling is often used to drain people’s bank accounts, while delivering little or no enduring personal growth.

2. IT'S 'ALL GOOD' IS A DECEPTION THAT SIDE-STEPS REAL GROWTH

The second issue I have is even more important. Real personal growth involves discomfort.

It involves lots of pleasant feelings too, like calm, peace, open-heartedness, joy, and equanimity.

But there’s also the hard stuff – experiencing unpleasant emotions as we work through our stuff, our baggage. So if we’re lured into thinking that spirituality or personal growth is all feel-good woo woo, we’ll turn away from this profound work. We won’t grow. And the pleasant feelings will remain dependent on that company, product or guru.

3. MEANINGFUL GROWTH INVOLVES DIFFICULTY

The third issue comes hot on the tails of this. If we’re not willing to do the work – the difficult, challenging and sometimes scary inner work that leads to a different way of receiving our experience (independent of products, companies or gurus), we also won’t rise to the opportunities that come our way to have a positive impact on our communities, our societies, our world, because those opportunities often entail difficulty.

I have said to my meditation group that our growth practice is a community service.

Yes, we are working with our own experience – that meeting point of our inner conditions (physiology, hormones, personality, mind activity, mood) and the outer conditions (the situation we’re in; the stimuli coming from outside of us).

But as we become a more steady ship, keeping an even keel in stormy weather, dismantling our reactive patterns, opening to greater compassion, courage, and clarity, we have a positive influence on the people in our worlds – our families and friends, our communities, our societies. I’m truly inspired when I hear members of the group talk about the difference that their practice has made, not just to their lives, but to others in their circles of influence.

AN EXAMPLE

Here's a recent example that tested me in this way, where I believed that practising compassion for the many required a strong response that I knew would be upsetting to an individual.

The reason for the pause in my regular emails to you is that I’ve been in the athletics bubble. I went to the US for the World Masters Athletics Championships (Indoors), then while I was there I went to train in person with my coach for the first time. I tend to give myself over to these experiences, so not much else gets a look-in.

During World Champs I was faced with a difficult situation. The Team Manager had organised a team dinner for the Australian contingent. I don’t often attend these functions, largely because they're usually held at venues that don’t cater for vegetarians in any nutritious way.

But the Team Manager had been quite insistent that I and my two friends attend, approaching each of us individually and together multiple times, urging us to come. He’s a nice bloke and puts in a lot of effort as Team Manager, so eventually we decided we’d eat somewhere else first, and then come and say hello at the team dinner to support him.

Shortly after we arrived, said Manager got up on the stage with a microphone and started to make a speech. That speech turned into an attempt at stand-up comedy. And the punchline of the so-called comedy involved a comparison of the size of two female athletes ‘tits’. One of those athletes was my friend, seated next to me, who has breast implants.

So this was why the Team Manager was so insistent we attend!

As the joke was dropped upon us, the room went silent. I was shocked. I looked at my friend who'd turned a bright shade of pink. I looked around the room to see how others were responding. I looked at my other friend who returned my shocked expression. I saw the wife of an athlete who was attending World Champs for the first time looking around the room too, trying to ascertain others’ reactions, perhaps assessing whether this was indicative of the culture of this sport that her husband had just joined.

There was a member of the Australian Masters Athletics Board sitting in that room. She said nothing. By the time I’d recovered from my shock, the performance was over.

Over the coming hours, my shock turned into anger.

By 2am I was lying in bed, unable to sleep. This was not a good outcome given I was supposed to be competing the next day. My concern was that if this was treated as acceptable, then it would shape the culture of our sport in a harmful way.

In athletics, many of us female athletes run around a track in our underwear (briefs/fitting shorts and a crop top). We need to feel safe from unwelcome male attention, and yet our Team Manager had just declared in public that it’s okay to sexualise us.

With every hour that went by with no-one confronting it, it became more and more likely that this silence would be seen as a sign that this was acceptable.

I also knew that speaking up publicly would cause ripples in the pond that I wouldn’t be able to predict in advance. Not everyone would agree with me. Not even all women get it.

I didn't want to hurt the Team Manager, and I knew that it would be very confronting for him, though possibly a jolt he needed to truly shift his perspective.

I considered doing nothing, letting it go, leaving it to someone else. That felt safer for me in that moment.

But saying nothing, taking the safe option, was harmful! It would make me complicit in the unsafe culture, propelled by eons of human history, that allows women to be seen as sex objects instead of human beings. Not all of my female colleagues are as physically and emotionally robust as I am – I expect some of them would feel even more threatened by such a culture than I do.

To ensure the culture of the group remained safe, I believed the rebuttal needed to be public (like his joke was) and strong. I turned on my bedside lamp, grabbed my phone and wrote a carefully considered comment on the team chat, making it clear that his joke was inappropriate, disrespectful, and potentially harmful – that it was not okay.

I hit send knowing that I would probably wake up to some kind of chat-storm, probably disapproval from some who’d accuse me of having no sense of humour….. and I promptly fell asleep.

I realise this post is rather long, so I’ll briefly summarise what followed:

• Tone-deaf comment from chat manager objecting to personal criticism in a public forum (reply from me pointing out that it is the only public forum we had)

• Ignorant reply from Team Manager apologising for any offense caused (reply from me stating that offense has nothing to do with it, it’s about the safety of our culture)

• Private message from one male colleague thanking me for speaking up, saying this kind of thing is swept under the carpet in sport too often

• Comment from the President of Australian Masters Athletics (who was not there, and I didn't know was on the chat) assuring us he’d be looking into the incident

• Half hour conversation with Team Manager the next day, spelling out to him the potential harm from his comments, sharing what it’s like to be a female human who is sometimes treated like a non-human walking vessel of potential sexual pleasure by male humans who are generally bigger and stronger - rather than as a human being. Offered him some rules of thumb to guide him if ever in doubt. Explained why I felt I had to make my comments publicly.

• Team Manager got teary and I gave him a hug

• Team Manager posted a public comment saying we’d spoken and he understood and supported my words and actions (some people had expressed support for him by criticising me)

• President of Australian Masters Athletics posted that they take such things very seriously, and he’d spoken to the Manager and communicated that the joke was unacceptable

• President of Australian Masters Athletics called me from Australia telling me what action was being taken to ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again, and checking that I was happy with the response from both the Team Manager and himself.

This whole shebang was stressful. It’s really not what I needed in the middle of a World Championship. I knew that by speaking up I’d be risking criticism and disapproval. And I knew that most people would be too scared to support me in public, that I would, in all likelihood, be the lone voice. People would be talking about me in my absence, not always positively.

This is exactly what happened.

But I believe I did the right thing. I did what I could in the situation I was in, to prevent harm to myself and others. I believe that my actions contributed to female athletes being able to feel safe in our sport.

If I hadn’t done the work that I have personally, I would probably have done what everyone else did – nothing. My desire to be liked, and to avoid the unpleasantness of conflict would have dictated my actions. And I might have taken less care with what I said when I confronted the behaviour. Perhaps I wouldn’t have deleted the words dirty old man from my chat post – words that would have harmed the Team Manager in the process of trying to prevent/undo harm.

So back to my initial reflection – doing the work of genuine personal growth is not a selfish thing aimed solely at making ourselves feel good, let alone all the time. It benefits us immensely, of course, but the ripple effects extend beyond ourselves into our social circles, our communities and our societies. It is a brave, kind, and honourable endeavour.

I respect your efforts enormously.