On Growth – part 2 (Emotional growth)

Life happens! Situations in life are ever changing and evolving, and so are we. However, the growth taking place in our internal world is not always in tandem with the obvious physical aging we all experience. A pivotal growth area in our internal world is EMOTIONAL GROWTH.

Emotional growth explains why a young 25-year-old may sometimes display a depth of emotional intelligence many 50-year olds do not have. On the other hand, you might wonder why some 40-year olds still display the same level of emotional maturity they displayed as 20-year olds. This is because unlike physical aging, emotional growth is not always linear.

A lot has been written about emotional intelligence. What it is and what it’s not. The focus of this post is not on emotional intelligence but to ask practical questions or provide more insights on how/if we are making progress in our emotional growth journey.

Let’s delve right in.
One of the greatest hallmarks of emotional growth is when we can objectively see situations in life for what they are and not what we imagine them to be. In other words, you’ve learned not to project your unconscious biases on people or situations but see them for what they truly are.

Read that statement over and over again. It looks simple but it will astound you how incredibly difficult it is for an average person to achieve this level of emotional intelligence.

One of the greatest hallmarks of emotional growth is when we can objectively see situations in life for what they are and not what we imagine them to be.

Do you know why it is incredibly difficult? It requires a great deal of humility and being “unassuming.”
Suffice to say that our emotional growth is tied to how much progress we can make in becoming more humble and more unassuming?

(NB: Unassuming- not pretentious or arrogant; modest.)

What humility and being unassuming do to our emotional growth is they help us see each individual as a unique entity with emotions, feelings, and outlooks towards life. And that other people would not necessarily see things the way we see them.

Another sign of emotional growth is the extent to which you have developed empathy over time. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and be able to see things from their standpoint. Mind you, this does not necessarily mean you have to AGREE but at least you UNDERSTAND.
For instance, getting to understand why a co-worker acted mean on a particular day does not mean you agree that it’s okay to be mean but at least you were emotionally matured enough to understand. That understanding helps you choose your response rather than give back fire for fire. That’s what emotional intelligence is about.

Another underrated aspect of emotional growth is in how well we’ve learned and know about ourselves over the years – our strengths, weaknesses, tendencies, inclinations, propensities… Some people never emotionally grow to the level where they can question why they act the way they act, their motives, and even reasoning process over a particular issue.
Have you ever come across some fellow and you wonder why they could be living in so much self-denial. Sometimes you find it so ridiculous how people can lie to themselves over and over to the point where they actually believe their own lie. Don’t be too quick to judge though. It may be more common than you think and we are not immune to it. However, a healthy emotional growth curve would have put this on check in many people.

This takes us to the last point – Emotional awareness.
Have you ever entered a place and you can immediately sense the mood, the ambience, the atmosphere. That’s called being emotionally aware and it’s a stage of emotional growth. Achieving this stage is highly commendable, because it helps us learn how to comport ourselves with grace.
However, as beautiful as this sounds, having emotional awareness is not enough. This leads us to the next stage. I call this stage the ability to carry your own EMOTIONAL TANK with you everywhere. This is a case where you carry and sustain your own emotional atmosphere regardless of external influences.
You are unruffled by the negative (or positive) energy around because you carry your own emotional thermometer with you. In otherwords, if you’re a happy-go-lucky person always exuding positivity and confidence You would not get to a place with negative energy and SUDDENLY you’ve turned all gloomy because the prevaling energy swallowed up yours.

In summary,
On emotional growth, we have covered concepts like emotional intelligence, humility, being unassuming, empathy, self understanding, emotional awareness, and emotional tank.

Cheers on our emotional growth quest.

To be cont’d

On Growth- part 1

Talking about being intentional about our growth. Let’s pause for a moment to reassess our understanding of GROWTH. What is GROWTH?
My close circle would probably have heard me say at one point or the other that “the beauty of life is in growth – It is in evolving to better persons than we were yesterday and moving a step closer to the ideal image God has called us to pursue.” As individuals, we are multifaceted and so is growth. Hence, growth entails improvement in: our thinking, attitudes towards life and other people, our capacity for handling particular tasks or situations, our skillsets just to name a few. It is in unleashing the potentials deposited inside us for God’s glory and the betterment of humanity one step/day at a time.
Growth might not be noticeable in timeframes of days but it’s in being able to look back at today in 5 years’ time and realize how much we’ve improved and grown. How differently we manage situations now than we used to, how temperate we’ve become in our responses to external circumstances, how well we have understood and now manage our emotions. The fact that we choose our responses to life issues and not merely just react to situations. How dependable we’ve grown. How well we now set goals and stick to them until they are achieved. Those are growth metrices right there. That’s the growth we’re talking about.

Growth process (Image source: https://crateandbasket.com/methods-for-germinating-seeds/)

Since growth is multifaceted should we delve into the different dimensions of growth?
The image illustrates the seemingly slow process of growth but when observed over certain time scales, the progress is phenomenal.
Image source: https://crateandbasket.com/methods-for-germinating-seeds/
To be cont’d.

A day in time – my surgery experience

On a cold winter day with mixed feelings, I stepped into the theatre, surrounded by nice nurses with 1001 questions and more documents than one to sign.

The Doctor in charge of anesthesia also came in and explained the details of the surgery procedure. One question that stood out for me before I passed out was when he asked for how best to pronounce my name – Temitope. The conversation drifted into where I was from.

Doctor: So I can call you “Temi” right? (Though he pronounced it like Timi)

Me: Exactly! That’s easier to pronounce than the full name.

Doctor: So where is your initial origin or where you’re from before moving to the US? Africa right?

Me: Yes. I’m from Nigeria in Africa. There are many independent countries within Africa.

Doctor: Okay? That’s about 3 countries or thereabout?

Me: (The Pan African in me could not wait to start educating). Nooooo. Africa is a huge continent with about 54 countries…

Doctor: (With a genuine naïveté that clearly shows he was truly unaware up to that point). That’s interesting to know. I didn’t know there are that many countries in Africa

The conversation drifts into something else…

It got me wondering for a brief second how little people in the US know about Africa.

So to my dear non-African readers, Africans in diaspora, as well as those residing in the continent but know very little about themselves, a simple google search like “Basic facts about Africa” will show a plethora of sites with an umbrella information about the continent. One of them – click here

Back to the surgery.

I had torn the Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) and some parts of the meniscus of my right knee while playing soccer last summer. The lasting solution was to undergo a reconstructive surgery and that’s what led up to this day- 01/20/2022.

Grateful for the gift of family (GF included) and wonderful friends for the encouragements -Abass Okeola, Elijah Akanbi, Dare Badejo, Pastor T, Gbenga Obikoya, my Labmates, the two Babatundes, and several others. Special thanks to the two Babatundes – Babatunde Onase and Babatunde Atolagbe for accompanying me to and fro the surgery center and ensuring I settled in well. I can’t thank you guys enough.

My gratitude also goes to the nurses and staff of Delaware Orthopaedic Specialists, and the legendary Doctor Palma who led/performed the surgery. The entire operation went seamlessly.

By the way I was acting drunk after the surgery due to the effects of anesthesia. I’m curious to know about other people’s post surgery behavior. Pls comment below…

If you laugh at me, I’ll locate you wherever you are🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣