Hands up if you’ve ever faced a setback, grief, rejection, a break-up, a failure, or a health scare?
I’m guessing your hand is up…
Adversity is one of the few guarantees life gives us, right up there with death and taxes.
But while challenge is universal, growth is not. Nearly all of us will face adversity at some point. And yet, only half report experiencing any form of growth as a result (Wu et al., 2019).
Life throws us lessons all the time if we’re paying attention… But growth depends on whether we actually take them in.
We lose someone and vow to live with more purpose.
A diagnosis forces us to rethink our priorities.
A client knockback humbles us, reminds us of where we need to improve.
In those moments, we promise ourselves we’ll change. That we won’t forget the learnings. But then… life picks up pace. The hamster wheel starts spinning again. And we forget and retreat to the comfort of our old ways.
The pandemic is perhaps the clearest collective example of this. Remember those early pledges? “Let’s not go back to how things were.” There was a global craving for more slowness, more connection, a different life rhythm.
We proved we could work from anywhere and still deliver. Innovation thrived because it had to. Our communities really mattered. We prioritised wellbeing. And we grew.
Yet, here we are, slowly drifting back to pre-pandemic norms.
Overflowing calendars are once again worn as badges of honour. Return-to-office mandates dominate the headlines, often under the guise of “culture.” Empathy, once central to leadership conversations, is fading, both for ourselves and for others. Engagement is slipping, especially among those seeking deeper meaning in their work.
Of course, some returns to routine were necessary – economic and structural pressures are real. But defaulting to familiarity without reflection is where we risk losing what we learned…
We had a global reckoning. A moment where everything paused, where we questioned, recalibrated, and reprioritised. But sadly not everyone used that time to grow. Despite the scale of the challenge, many individuals and organisations have reverted to old patterns. We had the opportunity to evolve and some of us didn’t take it.
So what stopped us?
Resilience is the Entry Ticket
We talk a lot about resilience in leadership, wellbeing, and performance circles (and we’ll be doing so again tomorrow in my Masterclass). And for good reason – resilience helps us get back up after we’ve been knocked down.
But viewed through that lens, resilience isn’t the peak of human performance. It’s the entry ticket or the baseline, the bare minimum required to stay in the game.
Real growth, the sustainable, meaningful, high-performance kind, requires much more.
It demands that we learn from the challenges, integrate the lessons, and alter for the better as a result. Because bouncing back to where you were just isn’t enough anymore. In today’s world, where change is constant and challenges are unrelenting, the real differentiator isn’t just how quickly you recover, it’s how much you grow from it.
And when growth is embedded, performance doesn’t just recover – it compounds. Yet, this is where most individuals and organisations stall. We fixate on the recovery on getting “back to normal” instead of asking whether normal is worth returning to. Even when the real opportunity lies not in the return but in the rebuild.
What Stops Us from Growing
If we know growth is the goal, and that resilience alone isn’t enough, then why don’t more of us evolve after adversity?
Part of the answer lies in human nature. Change is hard, even positive change. It requires a lot of intention because let’s be honest, it’s easier not to change!
We are wired for familiarity. Our brains crave certainty, even if it means clinging to outdated beliefs or behaviours that no longer serve us. But comfort rarely leads to transformation.
When challenge hits, it disrupts our sense of identity, routine, and safety. And unless we have the internal and external resources to process what’s happened, we default to surviving, not growing. Things like social connection, a sense of meaning, emotional regulation, and psychological safety can support us here, and they are capacities we can build. Yet this is where organisations often miss the mark. They focus on performance and productivity, but they underinvest in the foundations that actually enable growth.
If we want people to grow, not just bounce back, we have to create the conditions that make that possible.
What The Wiggles Can Teach Us About Growth
At the recent IPPA World Congress, I watched a presentation by the former CEO of The Wiggles. He led them for 11 years, during their massive growth phase, when there were only four (and not a grey hair in sight).
Now, The Wiggles might not be the first name that comes to mind when we think about elite performance. But they should be.
They were performing over 500 live shows a year – yes, that’s more than one per day!
And they weren’t just entertainers. They were, and arguably still are, one of the most disciplined, feedback-driven, high-performing teams in Australia.
You see, The Wiggles approached every performance as a learning opportunity. After every single show, they observed what worked – what made children light up, when energy dipped, when attention was lost. And they adapted, not once a year, not after a quarterly review, but in real time.
This is what real growth looks like.
Not just getting through the show. Not just being resilient through the travel, the fatigue, the repetition. But learning from every moment, iterating constantly, and improving relentlessly.
Their success wasn’t just built on performance – it was built on a growth mindset, on learning loops, on a feedback culture. On doing the work, reflecting on it, and doing it better the next time.
Most businesses don’t do this. Many leaders don’t either…
But The Wiggles do. And they’re still standing tall in an altered form, despite market shifts and generational change.
We’ve all faced adversity. Some of us are in it right now. Resilience will get us through but growth will take us beyond.
And yet, too often, we rush back to “normal” before we’ve asked the most important question: What is this experience trying to teach me?
Whether we’re leading teams, navigating personal challenges, or rebuilding after a loss – the opportunity is not just to bounce back, but to grow forward.
That’s what the strongest people and teams do. Because they choose to. They embed the lessons, adapt and evolve.
The lessons life hands you will keep repeating until you finally learn them…
So, what would it take for them to stick?
