Sweeney’s Reflections – August 2022

Good afternoon everyone,

I hope that you’re all having a lovely start to the week 🙂

I’m back again for August’s Sweeney’s Reflections, and this month’s blog will focus on the concept of “growth”. I like to do these reflection-style posts as a way to jot down some of my thoughts on a range of different topics – if you follow along with this series of posts, it’s like you are following along my mind’s journey through life 😄

So, let’s see what today’s post has in store!

Hello & Welcome to Sweeney’s Blogs!

Growth is a concept that is closely related to evolution – they both talk about how people develop & change over time, typically associated to somebody improving or growing in one area or another…

Like many things in life, growth can take on several different forms – you can grow professionally, personally, socially, academically, the list well & truly go on. The more I think about it, the more I can see that there are endless ways to measure growth – it comes down to your own subjective opinion on what constitutes growth to you, wouldn’t you agree?

So the question arises here for me, as long as we are constantly growing in our lives, can we ever do anything wrong?

There are, of course, extreme thought experiments that you could do to prove that this question is completely flawed – but let’s take a look at it at face value – if you grow/develop/learn from something which has happened, that makes the whole experience valuable to you in some shape or form. This makes the concept of growth possible at almost anytime, anywhere, as it comes down to a subjective opinion if that is how we choose to view the topic at hand.

I like to think that I have a very growth-focused mindset, and do find myself reflecting on these things fairly frequently, but if I’m honest, it’s something which greatly comes down to your perspective on life – allow me to elaborate…

If you have the mindset that failure can be your greatest teacher, then you will typically view failure as a positive thing, or at least view it as an opportunity for development. If your view on failure is that it teaches you something that you can use for future benefit, then that means that you see failure as an experience from which you can grow & develop from.

However, if you see failure as a bad thing, and/or something that you can’t or shouldn’t learn from, then in doing that, you are ignoring the potential for growth. On this thought path, we can see that growth is something that can be heavily determined by your outlook on life, there are countless areas where people can grow & develop, and ultimately, it is up to us to choose what & where we want to grow.

Those are just some of my thoughts/opinions on growth though, I could be completely wrong – who knows?!

Thanks for reading today’s Sweeney’s Reflections, what do you think? Do you enjoy seeing these reflection-styled posts? What sort of topics would you like to see me cover going forward?

Thanks for reading & I hope you have a lovely day!