I want to say something else that I think is important and that most people in the personal development space won’t say out loud.

The drift is not a sign that the practice isn’t working. It is often a sign that it is.

Here’s what I mean. When the practice is working, you are growing. You are examining stories, shifting beliefs, making decisions you’ve been postponing, having conversations you’ve been avoiding. That is not comfortable. Growth rarely is. And sometimes, somewhere in the middle of real growth, the part of you that preferred the old stability quietly engineers a reason to stop doing the thing that’s changing you.

There is a concept in psychology called post-traumatic growth — the idea that people who experience significant hardship often report not just recovering, but growing beyond where they were before. More resilient. More empathetic. Clearer about what matters. More willing to take risks because they’ve already survived the thing they were most afraid of.

The research on this is substantial and it keeps pointing to the same thing: the people who experience the most growth after adversity are not the ones who suffered the least. They’re the ones who found meaning in what they went through. Who asked not just “why did this happen to me” but “what did this make possible?”

On May 23rd, 1990, Jana was a teenager living a full, active life in rural Kansas when a car accident changed everything in an instant. She was paralyzed from the chest down. At 15 years old, in a moment she didn’t choose and couldn’t have prepared for, the life she had known was completely rearranged.

For weeks, Jana was somewhere in that mix. Fifteen years old. Trying to make sense of something that didn’t make sense. And every night, she cried herself to sleep.

Every night. Until one night she didn’t.