When your a kid you get a lot of opportunities to grow and expand your horizons, you are constantly encouraged to pick up new hobbies, new skills, and you’re in school constantly expanding your knowledge base. This continues throughout the school years, though perhaps we scale back on the number of new hobbies and start devoting ourselves to our favorite ones. Then when we go to college we expand even farther, we are making big choices that change our lives. We are pick new directions to grow and then allowing ourselves the hardship of that growth. You hit it again after school when searching for jobs and having to shape yourself for employment. We hit these stages in relationships too when we move for work or love. These are set growth points, we are forced to grow to meet these points in our life, and that’s a good thing, but sometimes we fall into a pattern of normalcy were the expanding stops.

These points are also needed, it’s hard to grow constantly and you need to take some time to enjoy what you have! There is nothing wrong with enjoying these periods, it’s just sometimes they also stick around to long. We settle in them and grow compliant and don’t push ourselves. This is when we need to force ourselves to grow. It’s not 100% necessary for living but it gives us excitement and it helps make us into a more well rounded person.

That does not mean that expanding our horizons has to be life altering moments. They can be any shape or form your willing to let them be, but here is some ideas:

• Expand the topics you read and watch: Have a type of show or a genre of book you love? That’s great, keep enjoying it, but add in others. Watch a few documentaries. Pick up a thriller instead of your historical fiction. Read a few classics that you probably haven’t thought of since school. It doesn’t all have to be educational, but expanding the type of content you consume can expand the connections in your brain and help you make new ones.
• Get rid of dead end roads: Have you been chipping away at a dead end job to get experience? Yeah, we’ve all been there. It’s a needed step of adulthood currently, but just because you needed to do it doesn’t mean you need to do it forever. If you’ve been stuck in a job you don’t enjoy for too long, start quietly looking for things that can help you build your career. Do you love your job but need some help with a dead end salary? Look into simply side hustles that can help revive your bank account and allow for the living you’ve dreamed of doing.
• Make friends with someone different: There are a lot of benefits to growing your social circle with people who differ from you. And chances are, you probably already know a few of these people but have just failed to connect with them because they aren’t in your current circle. Make friends that talk about different life experiences and have different ideas that you might not get in your current group of friends. They’ll expand your horizons and you’ll expand theirs!
• Pick up a new hobby: Even a small one that doesn’t take up a lot of your time. It doesn’t have to be like it was when you were in middle school. We don’t have that time anymore! But picking up a new hobby to dabble in when you need to unwind can seriously help you grow in both talent, skill, and also in interest. The more we know the more interesting we can be. It can also bring new friends!
• Round your corners: Notice if your skill set is very one sided, then research how to round it out. Simply taking a good hard look at were we are currently can lead to be improvements. If you create awesome work but are bad at managing time it might be time to read up on time management. If you are productive at work but not at home, it might be time to come up with a solution that helps you carry over that productivity for an extra hour.