What Do I Do When People Around Me Don't Support My Growth?

1987. I was twenty-three years old with a mortgage, a baby who did not sleep, and a full-time job. I had gotten it in my head that I needed to learn something, so I started carrying a paperback into the lunchroom. Twenty minutes, four nights a week. That was the whole program. The ribbing started the second night and it never really stopped. So here is the short answer, and it took me years to earn it. When the people around you don't support your growth, they are not voting on your growth. They are protecting the version of you they already know. You do not owe them a smaller life, and you do not have to cut anybody off either. You add one person before you subtract anybody.

The book was about maintenance planning. Thrilling stuff. Somebody asked if I was studying to be the boss. Somebody else said the book was not going to make the machines run any better. It was never cruel. It was just steady, it landed every single night, and I am a guy who likes being liked.

I quit carrying the book for about three weeks. Then I started again, and I put a lunch bag on top of it, which is the least dignified thing I have ever done in a workplace and I am 63 years old.

Why Do People React Badly When You Start Growing?

Because change in you creates work for them. That is the whole mechanism, and it is a lot less personal than it feels at eleven at night.

If you start getting up at five, the guy who sleeps until seven now has a comparison sitting at his own kitchen table, and he never asked for one. If you sign up for a class, the friend who talks about going back to school has to hear about somebody who went. You moved a line that other people were standing comfortably behind.

It usually shows up in one of three shapes.

• The joke. "Look at Mister Self-Improvement over here." Softest and most common. Easy to laugh along with, easy to quit over.
• The silence. You mention the class and the subject changes. Nobody says a word against it. Nobody asks a single question either.
• The reminder. "Remember when you were going to run that 5K." Your own history, handed back to you as evidence.

None of those is a review of your plan. They are all the same short message wearing different clothes: please go back to being predictable.

What Their Reaction Is Actually About

The loudest guy in that lunchroom, the one with the best material, had started night school twice and finished neither. I did not learn that for two years, and when I did, every joke he ever made at me rearranged itself in my head.

He was not talking about my book. He was talking about his transcript.

That is the thing worth carrying out of this article. When somebody swipes at your growth, they are almost always telling on themselves. The reaction is a photograph of where they are standing. It is not a scouting report on where you are going.

Which means you can stop arguing with it. You are never going to win that argument anyway, because the other person is not actually in it.

Do I Have to Cut People Out to Grow?

No. And most of the advice telling you to was written by somebody with no mortgage, no in-laws and no history.

You cannot fire your brother. You are not going to divorce a friend of thirty years because he thinks podcasts are silly. Real life has people in it who are load-bearing, and the honest version of this advice is not cut them off. It is change what you bring to the table, not who sits at it.

Three moves, and they are small enough to start tonight.

• Stop announcing. I told people what I was going to do because I wanted credit before I had done anything. That is auditioning, not growing. Do the work quietly for ninety days and let it show up in your results instead of your conversation.
• Stop reporting to people who did not ask. If somebody has never once asked how the class is going, they are not your accountability partner. Give them the part of you they actually like. Keep the growth somewhere else.
• Protect the hour, not the opinion. You do not need anybody's permission or approval. You need the hour on the calendar to survive contact with Tuesday.

Some relationships will thin out on their own without one dramatic conversation. That is usually how it goes. You do not have to push anybody out of the boat. Some people just get off at their stop.

How Do I Find People Who Want to Grow?

Add before you subtract. If your week has nobody in it who is going somewhere, the problem is not the four people who tease you. It is the zero people who pull.

Where I have actually found them, in order of how well it worked:

• One step ahead, same building. Not the executive. The person doing your job well who is two years further down the road. They are reachable, they remember the part you are stuck on, and almost nobody ever asks them anything.
• The person who asks a second question. Watch a meeting. Most people ask one question to be polite. Somebody asks a second one because they actually want the answer. That is your person.
• A room with a start time. A class, a study group, a Wednesday night on a screen. A room of six people who showed up on purpose will move you further than six thousand people in a feed.

One name. One hour this month. That is the entire assignment, and it is the single highest-return thing in this article.

What If the People Who Don't Support Me Are at Work?

Then you have the harder version, because you did not pick these people and you cannot leave at nine o'clock.

Here is something I watched for months. Labels kept falling off a machine. We talked about adhesive, we talked about the supplier, we talked about the wash-down cycle. Meetings about it. Then somebody finally asked the technician standing four feet from the machine, and he answered in about nine seconds. He had known the whole time. Nobody had asked him.

That plant was not short of smart people. It was short of the habit of asking. And that is what most unsupportive workplaces actually are. Not hostile. Just quiet, and used to being quiet, and nobody there decided it on purpose.

Two things work in a room like that. First, do the growing on your own time and let it arrive as results instead of announcements, because results buy you room that arguments never will. Second, be the one who asks. You cannot change a culture on a Tuesday, but you can change one conversation, and a room that has never been asked anything is remarkably easy to surprise.

Why This Is the Law of Environment

John Maxwell calls this the Law of Environment: growth thrives in conducive surroundings. When I first read it I thought it meant a nicer office. It does not. Your environment is not a building. It is the handful of people whose reactions you can predict before you open your mouth.

Read that back. If you already know exactly what every person in your week will say about your new plan, and none of them will say tell me more, that is not a personality problem in them. That is a design problem in your surroundings, and you are allowed to fix it without firing anybody.

Nobody is owed a front-row seat at your life. Plenty of people have earned a seat in the room. Those are different tickets, and you are the one who hands them out.

What Growing Anyway Actually Costs

I would be lying if I told you this was free.

It costs some easy closeness. There is a stretch, usually six months to a year in, where the old room does not fit and the new room is not built yet, and that stretch is lonely in a way nobody warns you about. Some friendships get thinner. That is a real loss and it deserves to be felt like one, not celebrated as proof you are winning.

And there is a second cost, which is that you will probably become insufferable for a while. I went through a stretch in my thirties where I quoted a book at everybody within reach. My wife eventually asked whether I had any thoughts that were actually mine. Fair question. I did not have a good answer.

Growth makes you strange to people before it makes you useful to them. Both of those are temporary if you stay humble about it.

Common Questions About Growing When People Around You Don't

Should I stop telling people about my goals?

Mostly yes, at the start. Not because of jinxes, but because telling people feels almost as good as doing the thing, and it spends the energy you needed for Tuesday. Tell one person who will ask you about it again in two weeks. That is not announcing. That is accountability, and it is a completely different transaction.

Is it selfish to outgrow your friends?

Growing is not something you do to people. The word "outgrow" makes it sound like a verdict you handed down, and it almost never is. You changed how you spend Tuesday nights, and some friendships were built entirely out of Tuesday nights. Be honest, stay reachable, do not lecture, and let people choose for themselves. Most of the guilt here comes from expecting a clean ending that real life does not hand out.

What if it is my spouse who is not interested in growing?

This is the hardest one, and it is the question I get most often. Do not recruit. Nobody has ever been talked into growth by somebody they share a bathroom with. What works is being a better person to live with, quietly, for a long time, and letting the change be the argument. Ask for the hour, not the agreement. "I need Wednesday evening" is a request a marriage can handle. "You should want this too" is not.

How long before people get used to the new me?

About six months of doing it anyway, in my experience. The teasing is a test with no proctor. It does not stop because you defended yourself well. It stops because you were still doing it in March, and at some point the joke stops being funny to the person telling it.

Reflection Questions

1. Write the five people you actually spend time with in a normal week. Not the five you like most. Next to each, write what they expect of you.
2. Read that list back. If nothing about you changed in three years, which of those names would be surprised?
3. When somebody teased you about your growth last, what were they carrying? What do you know about their own unfinished thing?
4. Who have you been reporting your progress to who never once asked? What would change if you stopped?
5. Name one person who is one step ahead of you in your own building. What is stopping you from buying them a coffee this month?

The Bottom Line

The people around you are not the referee. They are the weather. You dress for it and you go out anyway.

Do this one thing this week. Write down the five names, add a sixth that is not there yet, and send that sixth person one message asking for thirty minutes. Not advice, not mentorship, nothing heavy. Thirty minutes and a question you actually have. That one move changes your surroundings more than any conversation you will ever have with the four people who tease you.

So let me ask you the thing I wish somebody had asked me in that lunchroom in 1987. If you keep exactly the people you have and exactly the week you have, who are you in three years, and is that a person you would want to have lunch with?

This ties back to The Law of Environment — one of John C. Maxwell's 15 Laws of Growth.