Your Career & Your Growth Edge

Your 'growth edge' is an important concept to understand in the context of your career. Your growth edge is the fine and always shifting line between tolerating discomfort to create growth and, crossing your growth edge where you push yourself too far and as a result, experience unhealthy levels of distress.

Tolerating a level of discomfort to move beyond your comfort zone is both natural and necessary to make long-term changes and disrupt old patterns and narratives that don’t serve you. Doing this helps to build the 'muscle' you are trying to develop to create a new reality.

Where growth becomes unsupportive however of your overall wellbeing, is when you feel stretched beyond what is simply healthy discomfort. Examples may include experiencing workplace bullying, working for a leader who constantly disempowers, or remaining in a career or role that is creating unsustainable levels of distress.

Only you can discern whether you are riding your growth edge or, putting yourself in a potentially harmful position that impacts your emotional and physical wellbeing. 

To help you understand if you are riding your growth edge or, pushing yourself beyond your capacity, ask yourself:

• Am I simply uncomfortable or, is where I am right now feeling harmful?

• Do I feel unsteady and uncomfortable or, am I completely unhinged?

• Will I need to do something potentially destructive later as a way of coping with the distress I am feeling right now?

• Is what I'm doing / how I am showing up, in alignment with my values and who I want to be?

Career Coaching helps you learn what is possible even if it doesn’t yet feel comfortable. It’s where challenge meets your capacity. Coaching also supports you to become aware of limiting beliefs, blind spots, or habitual patterns that are holding you back. Reach out today to learn more, and see how coaching can support you.