How Not to Grow a Unicorn | READ

Do you think your career growth is stunted?

Are you having to shape yourself to fit into the environment you are in?

Do you know that you have not reached your true potential?

My 7-year-old son is absolutely enthralled by unicorns and of course whatever you focus on you will find. He can find unicorns everywhere, unicorn towels, unicorn lamps, unicorn phone chargers (really!) to state just a few. One day he spied a ‘hatch and grow your own unicorn’. It’s a purple egg shape approximately 10 centimeters and the instructions tell you to immerse the egg in a bowl of water. You watch it over a period of 72 hours (a long time for a 7-year-old with patience issues!) and the unicorn will hatch and grow. It tells you to move the hatched unicorn into a bigger bowl of water to continue to allow it to expand. My son had to change the bowl 3 times and once it had grown to 30 centimeters, he became bored and lost interest. In a busy household, the unicorn was forgotten about but a week later I noticed it, abandoned in a bowl in the bathroom. In that time the poor unicorn (yes, I now have a love of unicorns) had tried to grow but as his bowl was now too small for him, he had started to contort and shape his body to fit his limited environment. He had ended up all twisted and quite sad looking.

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‘Your playing small does not serve the world’

Marianne Williamson

Energy flows where attention goes

It really struck a chord with me, as I asked myself the questions: how often do we as humans bend and contort ourselves to fit in with our environment? Maybe when our career was first ‘hatched’ the ‘bowl’ was big enough for us to grow and develop and maybe some of us were brave enough to find bigger bowls to grow in? But it begs the question, who ensures that we allow ourselves to find the space to grow to our fullest potential? Will we live our careers ‘abandoned’ as our ‘carers’ get bored with our perceived lack of progress?

You will either step forward into growth or you will step backwards into safety.

Abraham Maslow

Do you need a new bowl to immerse yourself in? Is it time to stretch and grow to your true potential? Would you like to discover how your mind works and therefore improve your learning power and unlock your true potential? Contact mary@marybarrett.global

I promise you I will be unicorntastic!