Individual Work: What does that mean?

The idea of doing your own work, your own individual work is floating around, filtering into conversations about life, relationships, faith and entering just about every area of personal growth.

Doing your own work is incredibly important.

Focusing on yourself and doing the individual work is a big part of maturing and growing throughout your entire life. It takes self-awareness, self-monitoring, and the ability to look deeply into the how and why of your daily inner world.

This work is complicated, layered, and honestly, exhausting. It takes God’s help, Holy Spirit comfort and a healing team of people to support you as you look internally for character traits, hidden motives, and a better understanding of how you feel and what needs to grow, heal, and mature.

It means a hard dive into your story, your timeline, your goals, your hopes, and your dreams. It means a lot of slow, messy, quiet work as you learn how to sit with yourself and ask good questions.

Honestly, it takes a lot of perseverance, compassion, and understanding for yourself as you move through what you find, learn more about yourself, and slowly begin to practice new ways, new thoughts, and new beginnings.

Doing Individual Work

1} Self-focus – This is key. You can’t worry about what other work someone else is doing or not doing. You have to focus on yourself and ask God to shine his light on your own heart.

Fill your day with some healthy things!

2} Timeline – This is a powerful tool and one to go back over throughout your personal growth journey. It can be helpful to do this work with a counselor or a coach as they might see connections or patterns or traumas that you are missing. Draw out a good timeline of your life.

3} Sit with it – Sit with all the feelings. You might need a feelings wheel to help you identify what you’re feeling. Notice it, notice where you feel it, give yourself permission to fully feel it, show yourself compassions, speak truth, and sit with the feeling.

4} Discomfort – Individual work means being able to be uncomfortable and sit with discomfort. It means learning not to fix or control or manipulate. It means hold steady. Staying in your story with your feelings can be very uncomfortable so don’t be afraid to bring someone else into it all to hold the story with you.

5} Breathing – Practice breathing, holding, blowing out, breathing deeply again. Your whole body needs the space to slowly breathe.

6} Check motives – Are you doing this work for yourself or for someone else? Are you staying focused on yourself and your own things to do? Are you hoping this wins you back a relationship or access to someone? Are you doing this to manipulate or check boxes to say you did some work?

This is a you and Jesus thing. Please, do this work for yourself. Allow it to impact others but do the work for yourself. Start to see subtle signs of change and healing.

7} Journaling – Get ready to start writing. It can be brain dumping or lists or thoughts or feelings. It can be prayers and verses and lessons learned. It’s a beautiful way to clear your head, talk to God, stay aware of yourself and your thoughts, while treasuring the whole process in one place.

8} Unpack, unstack, unzip, unravel – Whether working through something like your grief tower or learning how to process {because what does that mean anyway?} your days, a very healing task is writing letters. These aren’t letters to send anyone. They can be angry rants or harsh feelings or deep grief. You can say all the things you need to say about one thing or one event or one person. You can see where it goes, where it leads, what it brings up and out of you. Write those letters.

9} Childhood and Family of Origin – This really does matter. Dig into it with careful, holy compassion for yourself and those in your story. Ask God to show himself present, real, and active in your growing up years. What are you leaving behind? What are you taking with you? What can you learn about yourself by looking back?

10} Your part – It’s valuable and needed to see your own part in your story. This means being honest about the story, about what has happened to you and what you contributed or needed or saw or held. What part of your story needs compassion? Forgiveness? Grace? Action? Repentance? Where do you need to build resilience?

The beauty of all of this… true individual work will impact you, your work, your home, your family, your close relationships. The changes will be felt in ways that build trust and safety. That is a great measure of change and individual work.

11} 100% Commitment to the Truth – So often, we have rose-colored glasses on, either towards ourselves or towards others. It’s hard to call things out, see things as they are, lay it all on the table, and live in the reality of what is happening. Gut-level honesty in every single area of faith, relationships, and current dynamics. The truth does set you free. It also can be scary, hard, confusing, and devastating because once you see it, you can’t unsee the truth.

12} Courage – Individual work takes a lot of courage. It’s. brave and bold to do this work and take action on growth points or transitions or necessary endings.

13} JADE – Once you begin your individual work journey, learning boundaries, healthy habits, and begin to change, it can be uncomfortable for those around us. The ones who benefited from our unhealthy ways and loose boundary lines will not be too excited about the changes. Do it anyway. You do not have to justify yourself, argue with them, defend yourself or explain yourself.

14} Learn how to regulate your own emotions, feelings, and nervous system. This is super challenging. It takes all the things mentioned above while slowing the whole process down so that you can be in the moment, recognize what is happening and make a decision about how to respond rather than react. A lot of times, this requires professional help through coaching or counseling. But for your wholeness and healing, it has to be part of your own work.

15} Even if it feels unrecognized or unseen, keep doing the work. Keep reading the books, journaling, praying, and healing. Keep going.

16} Recognize abuse and trauma. Healing from trauma and abuse, hidden or otherwise, takes a long time. It takes help, honesty, vulnerability, new skills, quiet work, quiet moments, slowing down, saying no, and sometimes, walking away. You can’t heal from trauma and abuse if it is still happening in your home, work, life, or family. You just can’t. When someone shows you who they are, believe them. You need time and safety. There’s no fast or easy button for this work.

Podcast: When Loving Him Hurts

17} Recognize your own enabling, peace-keeping, codependency, trauma bonds, fear, and unhealthy ways to making it ok for others while neglecting yourself. Stop. Say no. Change the dance, the pattern, the relationship boundaries. Recognize your own part and do your own work, even if someone else is unhappy or no ok. Do your work to heal, change, grow, and adult as an independent human being.

18} Boundaries – I wish I could talk with you in person about boundaries. This is KEY to doing your individual work. Figure out what you want and need. Determine what you’re willing to do and not willing to do. Stay in your own lane and do your own work. This gets into levels of access, bids for connection, and trust. This can be so broken, so fluid, so enmeshed that it takes a great deal of individual work to untangle it all. You don’t have to do this alone. Reach out for help.

Do a capacity audit. It’s helpful for boundaries: Spoonfuls of Capacity and a Closer Look at your Spoons

19} Share your story. Share it in safety. Slowly let it all pour out. On paper, with a coach or counselor. Get through all the mirky and muddy and messy in safety so that you can begin to share your story in other ways, in healthy ways.

20} Have fun! Dig into enneagram or internal family systems or even neurodiversity or mental health challenges. Get to know all the parts of you and let Jesus love on all of you in health. It’s beautiful, hard, fun work.

21} Time with Jesus. This could be at the top of the list, through the middle of the list and at the end of the list. It is a habit, a practice, a lifestyle that invites him into the process with you every day. Sometimes two a day. Sometimes you need a verse with you or worship music playing or a faithful friend to remind you of his love. Your time with Jesus is a major part of individual work and personal growth. Grab onto him. He is your handhold through it all.

Evaluate: Whose voice is the loudest in your life? in your heart? in your head? If it isn’t God’s… it’s time for more individual work.

Finally… this is a lot. Individual work is long and hard and slow.

Overwhelm can quickly set in and it feels like you’ll never do all the things, read all the books, or listen to all the podcasts.

Just take one step towards growth. One change. One thought that might impact your days.

Individual growth is an opportunity, an invitation, and a precious process.