When it comes to the area of your “Self,” there's one more thing I want to talk about.

First I want you to feel stable because your pie has all the right pieces, I want you to be doing all the preventative work to protect your mental health, and I want your soul to be filled. But when all those things are in place, you probably still won't be satisfied. There's something else that high-performing women need in their personal pie.

I'm talking about growth and learning. When you stop learning, you stop living. I love learning. There has to be room in my pie for that. When I haven't been to any learning events for a while I'm not myself.

Learning doesn't have to mean studying from books: The aim is to get wiser. I don't think that people write down on their bucket list “I want to be a wise old man” (or woman), but if you're a career-driven type or an entrepreneur you'll have a curious mind. So learning is always important, but you need to define learning; it doesn't always mean reading a book or studying a degree or going to a Tony Robbins seminar.

Here's how I think of it:

Learning is anything that leads you toward the person that you want to be.

Everybody's version of this type of learning will look different, so I'm not going to tell you exactly how to pursue it. I only have a couple of recommendations for maximizing your learning and staying curious.

GET OUT OF YOUR BUBBLE

Most of us tend to learn more about the things we're really good at, and sometimes we forget there are other things in the world we could be learning about. Learning isn't just about getting better at one thing!

My first recommendation is to learn more about the things that the voices in your head tell you you're bad at. If you and your partner want to be better parents, go figure that out. If you're underconfident in one area of your career, focus on the thing that's holding you back. There are some things you're never going to be good at and that's fine, but don't just bury those things; at least look at them from time to time. Don't fall into the trap of only learning more about the things you already know. It feels good but it won't take you anywhere new.

My second recommendation is to be open to experiencing things you wouldn't normally like or choose. In other words, get out of your bubble. This is one of the reasons I love Entrepreneur's Organization and Young Presidents' Organization, because we all take turns to pick things we do. Each person in my forum is in charge of planning one forum retreat and we all have to do what they plan. The best things are always the things that make me go, “I do not want to do that, not in a million years have I ever wanted to do that.” I don't have a choice, because it's somebody else's bucket list item. I always walk away from a new experience going, “Wow, I can't believe I just did that! That was so fucking cool!”

GROW YOUR RING SIZE

When a tree is cut in half and you look at it, the rings in the trunk tell the story of its life. Each ring shows a different stage of its development. In stages where there was drought and struggle, the rings will be thinner because they didn't have much to feed on. The wider rings reflect the times when the tree had access to more water and resources. The tree will expand when there's abundance and take what it can without apologies. And when there's a drought it doesn't apologize, either; it just shrinks and regathers and gets ready to grow again. Life's the same.

If you're a tree and somebody cuts you in half, what will your rings say about you? On average, I've changed careers every five years. So it's obvious I don't want to be a Paperbark, which you cut in half and there's no rings. There's not much substance to a Paperbark; it's all fluff. No, I want to be a wise old tree with heaps of rings, big ones.

Think about the size of the rings you want to grow. Yes, sometimes you're going to see a lot of change naturally because of abundance and things coming easily. But you can also push for change, and make the size of your rings bigger on purpose.

This is something Richard Branson taught me about growth and change. Imagine that you're standing in the middle of your current ring. Now imagine that you're going to draw a slightly larger ring outside of the one you're standing in. That's your new life. Whatever decision, change, or learning you're doing right now, it's going to expand your life and add a new ring outside of the one you're standing in now.

Most people can comfortably cope with a ring that's about 10% bigger than the one they're in. If the degree of change is more than 10%, you're going to get uncomfortable. That's why everyone gets so depressed coming down from the Christmas season: We've all spent more than 10% over our usual budget, our diet has been more than 10% different than usual and we've probably spent more than 10% of our time on holiday-related things that we don't normally do. Even if it's enjoyable, it's stressful.

That's “average” people—the rate of change they can cope with is 10%. But if you're reading this book, you're probably not average. You've probably got more of an entrepreneurial mindset, and entrepreneurs tend to draw bigger circles of change, up to about 30%.

So think about it: How big are the rings you like to draw? Is it 10% growth, 90% growth, or something in between? Wherever you are now, could you draw a bigger ring? Even if you just allow yourself 1% more change than you're normally comfortable with, you're growing. You're on the way to being a bigger, wiser tree.

When I take the step into the 30% larger ring I just drew for myself, the doubt sets in. I'm a little fish again, I'm surrounded by inspirational people playing a much bigger game, and I'm squirming … with a massive grin on my face!

I've drawn a few rings over the past two decades, enough to know that challenge serves me. I acknowledge and respect these feelings and become a sponge; I'm open to learning, okay with asking what seem like silly questions and confident that I will soon fill that area, enjoy it for a while, and then grab another piece of chalk and start drawing circles again.

Don't expect everyone (or anyone) to get it. Even the people closest to me, including my own parents, ask me repeatedly, “When will you ever be happy and content?” For me it's the journey that makes me passionate about life and connects me with the most inspirational humans on the planet. It provides a role model to my kids that doesn't involve one career or one model to live life and shows there are many ways to be happy.

Draw bigger circles, don't expect people to get it, and be unapologetic.

UNDERSTAND YOUR LEARNING STYLE

Everyone's got a different way of learning stuff. You need to understand your own style of development. Some people ask questions, some people seek facts, some people research, some people learn from experience.

I'm more of an auditory learner than a reader. During the 10 years that I was reading business books I learned less than in the two years I've been in EO and YPO. I love hearing people share their experience, not telling me what to do (I hate being told!) and I'm not into textbooks. If I'm excited and somebody's talking to me about a topic I'm interested in, I can absorb that better and even regurgitate it to somebody else later. It sticks. Find the learning channel that makes your brain a sponge.

I call my style “do the opposite.” Whatever everyone else is doing, I do the opposite. In business and in life. (Heck, I'm even left-handed!) When I was 30 everyone was getting married; I questioned my first marriage and got divorced. When other marketing agencies were chasing big names like Coca-Cola, I thought, What are the accounts they aren't chasing that pay just as much money for their marketing? And I chased those instead. When I met Florian I thought, I'll have children with this man first, as that's a bigger commitment we agreed on together, and then if we haven't killed each other we'll get married. Then he stayed at home with the babies and I was back on emails two days after giving birth. Now I'm starting to explore venture capital, which has such a bad image, but that's because everyone else is doing it a certain way. I want to do it my way. The opposite.

I think when you do the opposite is when you stumble on some pretty cool stuff, but that's hard. Sometimes I wish I could be satisfied like everybody else. Why can't I be happy with a marketing agency that turns over 1.3 million dollars a year? Why can't I invest in businesses “normally,” by giving money and taking equity?

But that's not me. What other people perceive as the rules, I see as guidelines to how things have been done before. I don't accept things as they are. I see them as I want them to be: fair and an opportunity to reinvent the norm. That's where the growth happens.

My friend Holly said to me once, “Everyone says ‘I'm a peg, where's my hole? Where do I fit?’ But when there's no hole, you just make a hole.”

That sounds like me.

In the previous chapter we covered how to stay stable and healthy. You probably need to have a certain baseline before you can invest energy in your growth, so if you need to do that work first, go back to Chapter 8.

If you're ready to grow, here's the next exercise and the next section for your bucket list. Do the exercise first, then let that inspire the next lot of items on your list!