a new way to measure growth
This thought hit me square in the forehead yesterday and I just had to share. Sometimes I have a hard time verbalizing my growth and personal changes because they’re not the typical growth path society expects. From the outside, I’ve quit a “successful” career to start a business where I’m not making much money yet. It’s hard to quantify the changes I’ve had in my mentality and overall well-being and I can only say, “I’m wayyyyy happier” so many times before it gets annoying.
But I figured out a way to measure it! My anxiety levels, moods, reactions, handling of stress, and overall satisfaction have all improved and all of those things are related to my emotional set point! Here’s what I’m talking about.
This is Abraham Hick’s emotional scale. In the book Ask and It Is Given, Abraham provides this chart to help the reader determine where they currently are and there are also exercises included for moving up the emotional scale.
But I realized that this is an excellent way to measure and monitor your growth over time. For example, when I was working in that “successful” career, I maintained an emotional set point somewhere between hopefulness and worry with my most common emotion being frustration. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my dominant emotion to be frustration. That’s just no good.
Where am I now? I’d say that I float mostly between joy and boredom with my most prevalent emotion being optimism. I can promise you it’s a much better place to be.
I do want to say that you absolutely shouldn’t be discouraged if you’re not as far up this scale as you’d like to be. And as a note to myself, I’ll also say that falling back down the scale isn’t the end of the world either. Sometimes we take one step forward and two steps back. Growth isn’t linear and sometimes it’s helpful to just accept where you are so that you can move forward.
But what did I do to move up the emotional scale? That’s a complicated answer. Lucky for you, I’m working on something that will introduce you to all of the tools I used along the way as well as my personal takeaways from over a year of learning and trying and failing and trying again. Introducing: 30 days of growth! This is a 30-day email series created with the intention to help you grow and move up this emotional scale. It will be launching on January 1st but will be available all year long for anyone who wants to join later. I’m so excited for this series and I can’t wait to work through it alongside you. You can read more about the series and sign-up over here!
