Fun fact about yours truly: I’m an amateur doctor. That just means that I’m somewhat  – okay, very – obsessed with my health and wellness, and that of the willing amateur patients in my life. If WebMD certified power users, I’d be their leader. I’ve diagnosed many of my own medical issues, and I even asked for a scalpel for Christmas one year (don’t laugh – I was 30 years old). My treatment philosophy, if you will, has a decided bent toward holistic, mind-body and ‘alternative’ modalities.

In fact, the “prescriptions” I most frequently dole out include:

• “Yoga”
• “Stop eating all that nonsense”
• “Cut out the wheat and/or dairy”
• “Try my spinach smoothie recipe for breakfast every day”
• “Call my acupuncturist”
• “Call my writing coach”
• “Try lavender oil/brussels sprouts/ valerian root”
• “Read ‘Necessary Endings’/ ‘If the Buddha Got Stuck’/ ‘The Art of Possibility’”
• “Get a dog (or two) – from the pound, of course”
• “You should rethink that assumption – are you sure that’s really true?”
• “Cod liver oil”

So it wasn’t completely bizarre that a friend rang me up the other day to ask whether I’d heard of an affliction that had stricken one of the star players of the high school baseball team he coaches: blebs.  Apparently, the boy had experienced a growth spurt in which his body grew faster than his lungs, causing blebs – a sort of blister that forms on the lungs – to develop. One of these blebs ruptured, causing his lung to actually collapse, rendering him bedridden for weeks.

This boy, who has recovered completely, was experiencing a severe case of something that many of us go through in a less concrete way as we try to make changes in our lives or businesses: growing pains. No matter how desperately we desire to proactively make changes, like losing weight or changing careers, or how much we crave to be more adaptable to our rapidly changing world or recover from our failures with more resilience, the fact is that sometimes – most times – change hurts. And often, change hurts enough that the most human, instinctive reaction is to stop what seems like the most proximate cause of the pain: our efforts at transformation.

Have you ever switched from junk foods to clean, whole, healthful foods and felt sick to your stomach? Or stopped smoking and nearly chewed your fingers off?  Have you cut back on watching television, your spending or your gambling and noticed how your former compatriots in those activities tried to nudge you back into bonding over these things?

Two words: growing pains.

One summer, I was making some major transitions in my career and my personal relationships, and within a 10-week period of time, I broke my foot in two places, had issues with my liver enzymes, developed an infection in my eye, discovered a painful (but benign) cyst AND was diagnosed with the Epstein Barr virus (like mono, for grown-ups). Given my inclination toward health nuttiness, all this body drama was a great source of comedy in my circles. My friends joked that my liver problems stemmed from the lack of alcohol in my diet, and even my doctor called me the healthiest person with a bunch of random, painful health problems she’d ever seen. (I’m grateful to say they were all blessedly minor, in the final analysis.)

But I knew: it was all the change. I believe my body was giving off clues about the internal dis-ease (right?) and discomfort I was creating by slamming the brakes on some long-lived, dysfunctional habits, patterns and relationships. My physical symptoms were evidence of my subconscious resistance to the change, a deep-down ploy to distract myself from evolving into my highest and best life. I was tempted to just let go of some of my plans and new approaches, or at least put them on hold until I felt better, but I knew better – that’s how growing pains work! Instead, I made up my mind that I wouldn’t fall prey; I would not be derailed.

This happens to organizations and companies in transformation, too. The vivacious, energetic new hire gets sick as soon as she comes on board. Turnover spikes and angst proliferates among formerly happy staffers as a company rebrands, reorganizes or reboots. Here in Silicon Valley, where companies start tiny then put the gas on, big time, before they plan to go public, the gripes can practically be heard walking down any startup-studded street:

“I was employee number 20, and we’re at 300 – we’re just too big.  It’s not fun anymore.”

“We’re so corporate now!  It takes forever to get anything done!”

“If I wanted to work for a big company, I would have.”

“I loved it when we were scrappy.  Those days are long gone.”

“I’d quit, but I can’t afford to leave until after the IPO.”

“We’ve tried that before – it’s never worked, and it won’t work now.”

“We’ve never done that before and I don’t know why we’re doing it now.”

“This [initiative] is stupid.”

“So and so [new VP] thinks they know everything. But she’s clueless about how we do things here. She knows nothing about our culture.”

I recently talked with the owner of a small chain of thriving yoga studios whose unlined face frowned into a pained grimace when talking about the stalls and plateaus she was hitting in the areas of HR and organizational development as she tries to scale the business.

Companies are not immune from the literal pains of growing, no matter how small or large they are.  And you can see how they impact transformational efforts. Growing pains are one of the most common derailers of our efforts to:

• Create change
• Bounce back from failures
• Innovate new approaches
• Adapt to new circumstances, and
• Course-correct in our businesses and our lives.

The young baseball player with the blisters on his lungs?  He’s just fine, and should be back on the field soon. I hope this young man is done with this entire experience and never has to face anything this scary and painful again. Unfortunately, blebs often recur in tall men as they gain inch after inch in their teen years, growing faster than their lungs can keep up. Knowing this is at the root of the lung malfunction, (real) doctors will often treat recurring blebs by gluing the outer lung to the chest cavity, so that the lung cannot collapse in the future. They take extreme measures to ensure that this known problem cannot create the same threat to the patients’ health and growth in the future, and that he can grow without being felled by those insidious blebs.

In the same way, as we try to grow in our businesses, careers, families, relationships, finances, friendships and lives, if we can (1) understand, (2) anticipate, and (3) neutralize or address growing pains in advance, we can deactivate their potential power to derail us as we try to evolve and adapt.

So, let’s hit number one, here – understanding what underlies growing pains. (Part II will take on how we can predict and deactivate them.) As I see it, there are at least four primary reasons growing pains are a fact of the transforming life or business – and why they so frequently derail the changes we want or need to make:

1.  Transformation promises/threatens to bring about the end of the world as we know it. By definition, major changes represent the end of the world as we know it. Even if that world has lots of friction or pain points, even if it is functioning sub-optimally or barely functioning at all, it can be terrifying to anticipate that what we know how to do and the resources we’ve always relied upon might no longer be able to serve us in the unknown territory ahead.

This uncertainty is uncomfortable at its mildest, and unhinging at worst.  It also happens to be a necessary precursor to optimization, growth and evolution.

2.  Transformation creates great risk and exposure. Many leaders and overachiever types are so used to succeeding (and so self-critical when they don’t) that the concept of exposing themselves or their teams to external criticism or to the prospect of failure makes their bodies and organizations buzz, physically and energetically, with painful, chemical distress. These are the sort of growing pains that spark a knee-jerk return to status quo behavior, as we try to simply make the pain stop!

When we do this, we lose sight of the fact that exposure and risk are inherent, even elemental, in taking on transformation.

3.  Growing pains can be the vehicle for lessons, equipment, readiness we need to execute the new vision. Sometimes, the growing pains themselves create the precise opportunity and space to acquire the skills, connections and insights we’ll need to manifest our new vision and thrive post-transformation.

You might need to gain the skill of recognizing misaligned staff resources and terminating employees you care about for a challenge that you’ll have post-transformation and get that skill only when you step on the gas pedal of your organization’s vision and a beloved team member tries to put on the brakes.

If you believe, as I do, that a divine plan exists for your life, or that your products and services are destined to create great change in the world, it’s a short logical leap to be able to find the lesson or the meaning in the catastrophes – small and large – you encounter in your efforts to grow. If you don’t believe this, you can get to the same conclusion by taking Steve Jobs’ advice and trying to “trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

4.  Growing pains can manifest our resistance to change. Norman Mailer once said, rather indignantly, “I don’t think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.” One of the ways we shrink from the immensity of our personal or company’s purpose is by allowing our transformational efforts to be distracted and derailed by growing pains.

Chaos and crises of finance (corporate or personal), insufficient human resources (including depleting and draining ourselves through overwork!), and physical health are common ways our resistance to change manifests as growing pains.

Question: Have you ever experienced growing pains when you made an effort to change something in your life, or at work? What happened? Do you feel like they forced you to up your game, or did you get derailed?