New Year's Day, a day for flower-covered parade floats, football, chips and dip and New Year's resolutions. My earliest memories of New Year's Day are of my dad coming home with a dozen donuts and all of us sitting on the couch eating donuts and watching the Rose Parade. As a kid, I remember people talking about New Year's resolutions, but I never had one and I still don’t make them. Instead, I work to maintain what I like to think of as a growth mindset.

This mindset has changed over the years. When I was younger, I mainly focused on learning and developing skills every year. As an adult, it changed to a new skill or two and traveling. This past year looked a little different though. Going into it, I knew that developing a new skill and travel would be difficult due to a busy schedule with two toddlers and my husband’s work requiring him to travel for a large chunk of the year. While I wanted to learn a new skill and I had a list of things I wanted to do, it quickly became apparent that type of growth wasn’t a realistic expectation this year. So how could I continue to grow despite these limitations? The answer? Personal development. I took a hard look at myself and the things I’m not good at and focused on those. One big thing I struggle with is asking for help. I love helping others but struggle to receive it.

At home, I focused on communicating better with my husband about how we could work better as a team. For example, we changed my daily tidy-up routine to a nightly family activity. In my community, I learned to say yes more often when people offered to help and even asked for it when I needed it. This might seem small, but for me taking this year for personal growth was in many ways more uncomfortable and harder than years where I was able to travel and develop new skills.

Why do I bring this up? Growth is essential to running a business that continues to be successful, and it is an important part of developing a quality team. However, growth doesn’t necessarily need to be some great big obvious change, especially if your team and your farm aren’t ready for that. Growth can also be honing seemingly small but essential skills – like prepping cows for milking or cleaning buckets – to ensure those are done correctly. It could also be those in leadership finding small ways to be more present and create a better farm culture. This could be simply making a point of greeting every employee when they show up for work or if your team has the time to take on a bigger challenge like revamping the current training schedule and adding in a new skill for everyone to work on. Big or small, the point is intentional growth, even if it isn’t something that can be added to a checklist or measured.

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Finally, sometimes it simply isn’t your turn to learn a new tangible skill. Sometimes it is your turn to work on yourself so you can better support others as they learn new skills like writing their own name, taking their first steps or becoming a calf manager after several years of feeding calves.