Back in 2014, I wrote a four-part series called How Do We Grow? 

Those essays focused on the inner process of growth, written at a time when I was most interested in what happens inside the individual. More than a decade later, with more clinical experience and more life behind me, I’ve come to see what I left out: the conditions around us matter just as much as the choices within us.

Looking back, those early essays captured something important about the inner mechanics of change. Insight, intention, iterations, integration — the framework still holds true. But experience has taught me that describing the internal process was only part of the story. What I left out was the larger context: the supports and obstacles outside of us that shape whether change is even possible.

Because growth never happens in a vacuum.

We live in a culture that celebrates the lone hero, the bootstraps story, the person who overcomes the odds through sheer grit. We admire perseverance and discipline. And those qualities do matter. But I’ve spent too many years sitting with patients, parents, and students to keep believing that story is the whole truth.

Again and again, I’ve watched people summon every ounce of determination and still falter. And I’ve seen others succeed with far less inner fire, simply because the obstacles in their way were fewer, or because someone helped clear them. What makes the difference is not just motivation inside the person, but whether the path in front of them is blocked or open.

A few years after writing that first essay, I was invited to speak at TEFOS, which supports families raising neurodivergent kids — many living with ADHD and executive functioning challenges. Much of the conversation there centered on individual hacks: strategies for managing time, building habits, and getting things done. In preparing my talk, I wanted to offer something different. The framework I had written about earlier — insight, intention, iterations, integration — was a useful roadmap for the individual process of change. But to normalize help, I wanted to place it alongside a collaborative roadmap, one that showed we don’t have to do it alone. That was when the phrase came to me: “I need you to HEAR me.“

The Conditions For Growth

I meant it both as a request and as an acronym. HEAR: Help, Environment, Abundance, Removal of Barriers. Each one is essential. Each one is something we cannot provide entirely for ourselves.

  • Help means timely help — the right kind of scaffolding at the right moment. Developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky called this the zone of proximal development: the space where we can stretch into new skills, but only if someone supports us until we gain competence on our own.
  • Environment means a supportive context. Instead of thinking only in terms of talent, effort, or “growth mindset,” we should remember that the people who are most accomplished are usually the most supported. They’re buoyed by networks, mentors, and systems that reinforce their progress.
  • Abundance is having more than you need, a level above just barely enough. Having “more than enough” creates margin — the space not only to succeed, but also to fail and try again. Abundance makes growth resilient because it absorbs the inevitable stumbles along the way.
  • Removal of Barriers means always asking, “What’s in the way?” What hinders progress? What makes the road harder than it has to be? Growth isn’t just about fueling forward motion; it’s about clearing what blocks the path.

Together, these four conditions create the scaffolding that makes real growth possible.

Each part of HEAR is indispensable. But over time I’ve found myself returning again and again to the last one, Removal of Barriers. Not because it matters more, but because it is the part we so often ignore — and the part that explains why change so often stalls.

What’s In the Way

We tend to think the key to growth is how much someone wants it. But the bigger factor is whether the obstacles around them keep draining that desire away. It is less about the fuel in the tank, and more about the friction on the road.

You can see this in everyday life. Take the highly relatable effort to lose weight. Most people, if asked, would honestly say they know the right goals: eat better, move more. Many have had short stretches of success — a few months on a diet, a season at the gym. But almost everyone knows the rest of the story: the habits slip, the routines crumble, and the weight comes back. It’s tempting to tell that story as if it were about willpower. They didn’t want it badly enough. But the more honest explanation is that barriers reasserted themselves.

When you ask the people who have managed to sustain change, their stories almost always focus on barrier removal. Some reorganized their lives so physical activity was part of the day, not an “extra” that competed for scarce time. Others learned new cooking skills, dismantling the barrier of inconvenience or lack of knowledge. Many overcame a mental barrier — the false belief that healthy food must taste bad. Once that assumption fell away, the whole effort felt different.

The same dynamic shows up in research on work and motivation. Thaler and Sunstein describe tiny obstacles as friction costs in Nudge. For years, employees had access to retirement savings plans, but enrollment required paperwork. Few signed up. When the default flipped to automatic enrollment, participation soared. People didn’t suddenly get more disciplined. The barrier disappeared. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer saw something similar when they tracked thousands of work diaries and discovered The Progress Principle. The strongest motivator was a sense of progress, and the biggest drain was obstacles. That matches what I’ve seen — people rarely stop caring, but they do get worn down when the path is hard.

And the pattern doesn’t stop at work. Education makes it clear — students in the highest wealth quartile but lowest ability are just as likely to graduate college as those in the highest ability quartile but lowest wealth. Addiction recovery follows the same logic — so often framed as a battle of willpower, but in reality strongly predicted by conditions: people with steady work, supportive networks, and fewer triggers relapse less often (National Library of Medicine).

It’s striking how the same truth repeats itself whether you’re talking about a retirement plan, a workplace, a college degree, or the struggle to stay sober: growth is less about internal drive and more about external hindrances. And related, we should focus less on pushing harder, but rather focus more on figuring out how to make the path easier.

That shift matters. It reframes how we see ourselves and others. When someone struggles, instead of asking “Why don’t they try harder?” the more compassionate and effective question is “What’s blocking the path?” And that question doesn’t just change our perspective — it points us toward action. If we can see what’s in someone’s way, we can do something for them: remove obstacles, offer support, make growth possible.

That was my original inspiration at TEFOS — to normalize help, and to remind us that real change is never a solo project.

Because growth is both inner and outer. Insight, intention, iterations, integration — these stages still map the inner process. But they only unfold fully when there is also help, environment, abundance, and the removal of barriers.

I need you. To HEAR me.

A Final Reflection

Looking back at my earlier essay, I still see the truth of the four stages. But I now see why change often feels uphill and exhausting. The difficulty was rarely the process itself. It was the barriers.

Once those barriers are removed, the stages I wrote about a decade ago unfold differently. Insight comes with less struggle. Intention feels less forced. Iterations build without as much friction. And integration arrives not like a battle won, but like a welcomed arrival. Change flows downhill, carried by momentum rather than dragged uphill by willpower.

And maybe this is also why I bristle at the common generational judgment about young people and their so-called “failure to launch.” The phrase gets tossed around as if the problem were a lack of character, as if this generation simply doesn’t want adulthood badly enough. But the irony is that in an era when manned rocket launches are happening again, we all know what it really takes to be “cleared for takeoff.” Yes, the rocket itself is inspected over and over again, but more often the reason a launch is delayed is because the conditions are not right. Rockets only launch when the conditions are immaculate.

It’s strange then, that when we talk about young people, we blame the rocket instead of the conditions. We ask “what’s wrong with this generation?” instead of asking the better question: “what’s different about the conditions today compared to when I was young?” And the answer is clear. Launching into adulthood today happens against the gravity of student debt, rising costs of living, and a lack of affordable housing into the haze of job insecurity, the threat of AI replacement, and a fractured and increasingly lonely society. These aren’t personal defects. They are environmental barriers.

And here’s the irony: the very generation most likely to make this judgment — the Boomers — were also the most HEAR-ed generation in history. They came of age with affordable college tuition, stable jobs, cheap housing, strong unions, and robust public and government investment in infrastructure and opportunity. They weren’t more talented, harder working, or more driven. Definitely not more self aware. They had help, supportive environments, economic abundance, and benefitted from the active removal of barriers.

So when we talk about “failure to launch,” the truth is the opposite: it isn’t that young people don’t have enough fire in the engine. It’s that the conditions surrounding them are not favorable. And without those conditions, it makes sense to wait, and try again if things improve.

And yet even here, it’s important to resist falling back into the individualist trap. Because no one clears all their own barriers. To remove obstacles, to create abundance, to build environments that sustain growth — these things take others. They take help. They take collaboration.

When I say “I need you to HEAR me,” I don’t mean just listen. I mean that growth is a collective project. We help each other identify the barriers. We help each other find resources. We build environments together. We offer abundance to each other when scarcity narrows the path.

The truth is that real change is never a solo achievement. It is a communal one. Motivation may start in the “I,” but growth is sustained in the “we.”

And maybe that is the lesson it took me a decade to learn. When I wrote the original How Do We Grow? essays, I thought the four inner stages told the whole story. Now I see they were only part of it. My own understanding has expanded, shaped by the very conditions I’ve been writing about here: time, experience, the voices of others, and the barriers I’ve had to name and remove. In that sense, this essay is not just about growth — it is an example of it.

Because what makes change possible is not the mythic triumph of inner fire over resistance, but the shared work of clearing what stands in the way. Once the road is open, the natural process of change doesn’t just happen.

It flows.

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