You Don’t Need More Journeys or Personal Growth. What You Need Is Relational Growth.

Most growth-oriented people have over-indexed on inner work. For real growth, investing in your relationships can provide the greatest ROI.

Photo by Kyle Kesterson

Are you feeling stuck? Dissatisfied? Struggling in one or more areas of your life?

These times of discontent are when most of us reach straight for personal development and spiritual self-help fixes: Another psychedelic journey. A meditation retreat. A trip to the ketamine clinic. A deep-dive session with our energy worker. 

Here’s a hot take. 

You don’t need another journey. You don’t need to do more personal development work. You don’t need to go more deeply inward. 

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that what you actually need is relational growth.

Hear me out.

We are social creatures who live in connection with other human beings. Almost everything in our lives happens with other people. 

Think about how life unfolds through our connections: romantic partners, family, friendships, community, business partners, clients, investors, teachers, and mentors. A business, after all, is simply a network of people who are aligned and working together to build something bigger than they could build on their own. A marriage is two people loving each other, committing to building a life and often a family together, and running a household. Even a solo artist or writer is inspired and supported by others in some way—and relies on other people (an audience) for their work to be seen and appreciated, and to make a mark on the world. 

Given our social nature, I think we could all greatly benefit from putting more focus on our relationships as a path of growth. 

At the end of the day, all the things we want in life come down to the quality of our relationships. Success, happiness, love, adventure, meaning and purpose, and even wealth. Improving our relationships and how we show up for each other is often the key that unlocks greater happiness, connection, and the right opportunities. Whatever it is that you’re looking to change or improve, there’s a good chance that the best bang for your buck lies in investing in your relationships. (I shared some further thoughts on relational abundance in an old post you might want to check out.) 

When we struggle, we often think the way out is through solo inner work. While there is nothing wrong with looking at ourselves and our patterns, I want to suggest that we over-index on this type of work. Often, the work that is truly needed is relational.  

Don’t get me wrong—psychedelic journeys are great! You might gain a new perspective or insight that could change the game. You could heal some self-limiting beliefs or trauma. You might release some old emotions that have been trapping tension in your body. There’s great work to be done there and I personally have benefited immensely from journeys. 

The problem is that seeking personal development and spiritual self-help fixes becomes so habitual that we don’t even stop to think about whether more self-focus is actually what we need. There’s a time to search for the answers within ourselves and a time to just be ourselves, out in the world relating to other people. A time to go deep, and a time to come up for air. 

If you’re sitting in an ayahuasca circle every month and it’s not yielding the concrete change you’re looking for, consider how much of your growth work is isolated and solo-focused. Perhaps there are several blindspots around how you are showing up in the presence of others that are causing deep pain. Perhaps the real breakthrough lies in couples therapy or executive coaching group work, or just in an honest conversation and meaningful support from a close friend.

Are you struggling with confidence? The answer likely does not lie in a vision quest where you deeply reflect on the blockage in your solar plexus and how this is manifesting in a lack of self-esteem. It might. But chances are you’re more likely to find the answer and ultimately work through it by intentionally putting yourself out there and getting the ‘reps’ in, either socially or professionally.

Are you and your wife struggling with an ongoing conflict? The answer likely does not lie in you both doing separate psychedelic journeys. It might. But chances are, the best way to handle this is to get an experienced practitioner to help you move through the conflict more skillfully, and then apply their guidance in the day-to-day trenches of marital life. It also may lie in you doing MDMA together and talking things out, but that’s a story for another day.

Of course, if your end goal is to become enlightened, it’s probably best to do that alone. Many spiritual traditions encourage the path of solitude and renunciation as a way to reach higher states of consciousness. This makes sense for a monk or nun. It would be hard to advance spiritually on this level if you have a life partner, multiple young kids, and a company to run. There is no doubt about that. 

Perhaps this explains why so many spiritual leaders have relational problems like sexual abuse. They are spiritually advanced but relationally underdeveloped. We often confuse the two, assuming that someone who is spiritually advanced must also be a relational master, and we see time and time again that this is not true.

But if you want to be happier and more connected, if you want to enjoy your life more—which, for most of us, is really the point—I suspect it will be more fruitful to look directly at how you’re being with other humans than to spend more time alone observing your mental patterns.

Let’s do a little thought experiment here. Imagine two people who both want to enjoy more happiness, purpose, and connection in their lives. Person A is going to spend a year doing plant medicine ceremonies, working with healers, and going on extended meditation retreats. Person B is going to receive some therapy and coaching work around how they’re interacting with others (including couples therapy), while also spending more time connecting with their friends and family and having deep, honest conversations with them. Who’s going to succeed in their growth efforts? My money is on Person B a million times over.

For myself, I like a diverse portfolio of personal growth work that includes the occasional journey, ample solo time in nature, a spiritual practice, regular check-ins with a coach, a therapist, great friends who are honest and don’t hold back, and a couples therapist. It’s important to me that I balance my internal work on myself with the work (both in sessions and in actual life) on how I connect with others and the world.

The main takeaway here is that most of us under-index on relational work. We could all benefit greatly from adding more positive triangulation into our lives through relational work. My advice is to think about what the right balance might look like for you. You might just find that you get a lot further (and have more fun) taking the focus off yourself and putting it towards the other people in your life.