Challenges and Growth

Hi all,

Hope you all are well. I wanted to take a minute to talk a little about challenges and growth. Weve been at this for 7 years now and weve come far, but we still have a lot of challenges to overcome to get to where we are going.

The other day, I wrote about 7 Cups as a child and that theme will carry through in this post as well. As many of you know, I have 4 kids. They are the most important part of my life. I have also had different roles in life where I have worked with troubled kids. Kids that had rough childhoods, continued to get in trouble to one extent or another, but eventually did get their feet under them and grow through the challenges they faced. My kids and these other kids have taught me a lot about supporting people as they grow.

One key point is that you need to protect kids early on, and as they grow, from being too hard on themselves. You want kids to feel confident, to try hard, and to know that they can master things. The key part of this is something that is called self-efficacy (link), which means you start by mastering small things, then slightly more difficult things, and then you graduate to harder things and then eventually to extremely challenging things.

This is how video games work. The first couple of levels are deliberately easy. You get used to the game. You learn how to navigate. As you move through the levels things become a bit more difficult. Good games march the level of difficulty with your current level of skill. Games that are too easy are not fun and games that are way too difficult are demoralizing. The goal with games and with life is to be challenged just enough, but not too much.

This is sometimes referred to as an upside down U ( or as my daughter would say Dad, you mean an n. And shed be right!). The bottom part of the upside down U or lowercase n, on the left hand side, is too easy, as the person moves up towards the top part - that is the sweet spot - where it is challenging enough, but not too challenging, and then the leg down on the right represents where things are just too tough.

Whether it be parenting, therapy, or helping someone grow, you want the conditions to be right so they can be challenged and excel. They can figure it out and become increasingly confident and independent as they mature.

That is the situation that is helpful for growth. Let me now contrast this with a situation that is not good for growth.

Being overly critical, shaming the person, amplifying a persons weakness or focusing solely on a persons limitations are all ways of hurting a person and keeping them from growing. A lot of parents, educators, coaches etc. mean well, but end up severely limiting kids growth because they are too critical or expect significantly more (other side of the upside down U or n) than the child or teen can perform. All of this translates into adulthood as well. College, graduate school, early career etc. - any situation where people are overly critical of you and expect way more than you can give, will end up being a frustrating scenario that can impact your future trajectory.

Okay, I can imagine some of you are asking: what does this have to do with 7 Cups?

Well, as mentioned in this post, 7 Cups is like a child we are all raising. Collectively, we want to create conditions or an environment where 7 Cups can most flourish. We do not want to make things too easy, nor do we want them to be too difficult. We have to grow 7 cups by expecting things in that middle sweet spot, so 7 Cups can become increasingly confident and more effective.

7 Cups has received a lot of criticism over the years. Some of this has been true, or at least mostly true, and well deserved. Other criticisms have been false and not at all deserved. More tricky criticisms include some or a small amount of true criticism with layers of half truths that are ultimately designed to hurt us or weaken our efforts.

I could go into many domains where we have received all 3 of these types of criticisms. The content or domains matter less; what matters more is the framework of the criticisms and how we handle / respond to them.

Lets start with true and real criticisms. When these are delivered in a spirit of kindness they are great. It feels like a partner is coming alongside us, pointing something hard out, and that they want to help us do better. They see that we are giving it all that weve got, that we have limited resources, and they want to help us do better. This kind of approach and criticism is ideal and the result is that it helps 7 Cups grow, which is the goal.

The false criticisms designed to hurt and divide are unhelpful and can be painful. This can happen onsite or offsite. People can just make things up to try to cause pain in our community. This sometimes happens when people are asked to leave 7 Cups. We do all that we can to try to help people stay, but sometimes they do too much damage and we need to ban their accounts. These people can become particularly angry and lash out in seemingly endless ways. This type of behavior is not at all helpful in a direct manner; it is helpful in that it requires you to adapt and get tougher but that is a secondary result.

The last type of criticism is particularly poisonous. This is where someone brings up a truthful criticism, but then weaves in falsehoods and half-truths, making it challenging to disentangle what is true from what is false. Like the last criticism, this sort of criticism is also designed to hurt, divide, and weaken 7 Cups. These latter two criticisms are often compounded by our commitment to confidentiality. A person can say anything they want about us, but we cannot disclose anything about the offending person.

People that want to deliberately hurt 7 Cups and do not want to have reasonable discussions can be conceptualized as haters. I have dealt with more than my fair share of people trolling and people hating 7 Cups over the years. The sad thing is, the more successful we become, the more haters we attract. Haters usually hate things that matter.

Here are a few key things to keep in mind about haters:

1. 99% of the time the hate is not grounded in any sort of reality. They often feel really bad about themselves and project irrational things onto us.

2. Like with trolling, they want you to pick up the rope and fight with them. They are in the mud in their own life, struggling and ineffective, and they want to bring us into the mud along with them as the old saying goes: misery loves company.

3. Haters often overlook all of the other aspects of our community and focus in on one (or two) dimension that they see - that might be true or false - and say that one thing over and over again. They can feel like a broken record. Their goal is to try to get us to give up our entire identity and distract us. They do not want us centered, growing, focusing on impact. They want us stuck in the swamp with them. One sad thing is, that for some of these people, 7 Cups was one of the best things they had in life. It gave them a sense of purpose and meaning. They should just let go and move on with their lives, but they often dont have anything to move on towards. So, paradoxically, they try to keep part of that purpose alive by staying connected to us in the only way that they can.

4. The last thing we should do to better understand haters it to look at the other parts of their life to see if they have had any real impact. Many times they are very vocal about our limitations, but much less willing to be self-aware and to look at their own lives. They are happy to point out weaknesses in others, but much less likely to inward. The fruit on their trees - how they treat others, how people see them, the quality of their relationships, their own ability to make a positive measurable impact on making the world a better place etc. are often lacking. These folks can sometimes be, and this word is harsh, parasitical, because they are unable to build anything real or meaningful in their own lives. Roosevelt got at this with the following quote:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

We - the 7 Cups community - are the person in the arena. Many of us routinely pick ourselves up, brush the dust off, clean up the wounds and fight again. We have loved ones that have picked us up and brushed us off when we were not able to stand up on our own. And we do it again and again and again, because we know 7 Cups - and the broader work we do - is a worthy cause.

7 Cups has grown a lot in these 7 years. We have much more to overcome in the future. Most of the easy wins are behind us. The challenges now will be challenges that are a good match for where we are in our maturity or challenges that are too difficult for us to solve right now. We need wisdom, mercy, and grit to enable us to focus on the challenges we can overcome now and patience and hope that we will be able to overcome the more difficult challenges in our future. Criticism that is true and delivered with this context in mind will help us grow. Criticism that is false, half-true, or designed to divide us will not help us grow.

As we move forward and get stronger, lets remember to have one anothers backs as we stand in the arena. Lets provide constructive criticism to help us grow where we are now. A book I like has the title The Impossible Will Take a Little While. We are trying to do the impossible, so lets keep at it - one step at a time - meeting the challenges immediately before us. If we keep at it, lifting one another up, and ignoring people trying to tear us down, then we will get there. We will stand on that summit with hands uplifted and we will celebrate!