Una Palabra Sola Episode 8, crecer
Ah, yes… that uncomfortable feeling, like trying to sit up straight when you’ve slouched your whole life — that’s the feeling of growth.
crecer: (v) to increase the size and/or the quantity; grow; grow up.
Related words: Cultivar (cultivate, farm, till, grow, nurture), madurar (to mature [mentally]), criar (to raise children), aumentar (to increase)
Antonyms: disminuir (diminish), bajar (lower), reducir (to reduce)
Related noun: el crecimiento (growth)
From the Latin “crēscĕre”, to grow, become bigger
There are 3 main things every goal has to have in order to come to fruition -- intention, time, and the right environment. Listen to find how to get the most out of your goals and grow - porque con cada crecimiento, hay algo para aprender, hacer y mejorar.
3:34: Growth is fluid, dynamic; it doesn’t always start or stop on time. Nature will check itself through the natural progression of growth.
10:42: There’s always something to grow: personally, professionally, academically; outwards or inwards. It’s both exhausting and one of the best things about being alive.
14:49: Life is more than our tax forms. What are you feeling the lack of growth internally?
16:13: Time moves differently within adulthood. A lot of adulthood can be spent finding equilibrium between being excited and overwhelmed.
19:41: Growth has a shadow side. You need to have the shit so you can appreciate the good. You need to have the good, so you know what shit looks like.
For reflection:
Piensa en sustantivos. What external thing are you looking to grow next? What internal sensations are you looking to grow? ____________________________________.
Intention, time, and environment. What do you feel like you’re lacking, and what’s in your control to change?___________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
Think on the feelings that you’d ideally like to feel. Describe and visualize. ___________________________________________________________________________.
Una PS has been a labor of love from the beginning. If you’d like to join our lil’ love fest via the Deseo program, click here to sign up! We all have our own wishes and desires when it comes to language, and with some resources and accountability, I can help make yours come true.
TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
Hello and welcome to Una Palabra Sola where we get to learn Spanish, one word at a time. I'm your host, Megan Miller, founder and teacher at Aprovechar Language Solutions. Empezamos, and let's dive in.
Hola hola a todos mis amados oyentes; hello and welcome back to Una Palabra Sola, a podcast where we get to learn Spanish una palabra a la vez, or one word at a time. So today's word is a verb, and that verb is crecer, which means to grow or grow up. So, crecer, básicamente es aumentar el tamaño y/o la cantidad. Aumentar is another wonderful verb that just means to augment, to make bigger; aumentar. And you can aumentar el tamaño, you can make the size of something bigger and/or (y/o), you can augment the quantity or aumentar la cantidad and that is all about crecer. So crecer, once again, it's a verb. And it means to grow, to grow up. Um, so for example, with rivers, hay un crecimiento, there's a growth. They rise, um, moon, the moon grows into a full moon or waxes. So it's really to expand, to spring up, to swell, to rise, to grow, or really just aumentar, uh, which I know, spoiler alert, is one of the sinónimos.
1:51
Why? Well, because growth is painful. Um, I personally have been growing quite a bit and in, in a few different aspects, and it sucks. It is something new. It doesn't feel great, because all of a sudden, I'm not the expert on things. Um, so growth in and of itself has been on my mind. And really, I mean, the push is that we're growing constantly, right? But that's, that's not really feasible. We're going to grow and then we'll pause or, or maybe even retract a little bit and then grow again and then, you know, pause or retract a little bit. It is very much similar to a river or a moon, and that's why I love this verb so much.
It is something that is fluid, it's dynamic. It's not, oh, there's growth. Oh, hay crecimiento. Nothing like that. Crecer is one of those verbs that just really taps into whatever life force, anything that you believe in and you have the opportunity to grow and you have the opportunity to maybe pause or go back on that growth a little bit. It's not this constant thing, right? I, I hate it when people say, oh, you just have to be 1% better each day. And it's like, no, Tuesdays kind of suck sometimes, so I'm not going to be 1% better than Monday. Sometimes Mondays are fan-fucking-tastic. There's no other place to go. I've already reached the top there.
3:34
So with growth, it is something that is fluid, it's dynamic. It doesn't always start. It doesn't always stop. It just really depends. So with crecer… I know that was a huge tangent. For example, me crecí, I grew, I came of age. Um, kind of how crecer is used, right? It's used both for, um, growing up, me crecí, I grew. There's also un dicho, um, there's, there's a saying of crecer como la espuma, which is like to shoot up or go through the roof. And I know that we've all been there. Well not me, because I'm still less than five foot two. Uh, but we've all kind of been there when, uh, you're growing as a kid and everybody wants to comment on your growth. Oh, how tall you've gotten, “crecer como la espuma”, to, you know, shoot up. Monday, you wake up and you're three feet. Tuesday you wake up and you're three foot six. Puberty is weird.
Of course, it comes from Latin, which any Latin speakers, please, please comment on my pronunciation here because all these symbols, they kind of make my head hurt. Crēscĕre! I'm just going to pretend that I'm Italian here. Um, but you have synonyms, right? Synonyms, to grow or to become bigger or to aumentar, so you have aumentar to increase or augment, um, criar, which is really to raise children, criar, and that's. IAR, um, not, not like crear to create children perhaps, or creer, to believe in children. Maybe, you also have madurar, to mature kind of mentally to mature. I haven't really heard that one a whole lot. Then you have cultivar. Cultivar is really to cultivate, to farm, to grow, to nurture. Generally speaking, cultivar, that's with plants. Anything that is living that, that you really believe in maintaining, um, versus crecer, which is really, anything that you grow.
6:08
And of course, related nouns, el crecimiento. So crecimiento, especially with like graphs or certain things, there's that growth. For antónimos, you have a few. I mean obviously, you have bajar, which to go down. With that, maybe another synonym is subir, to go up. So you have bajar, which is an antonym. You also have disminuir, which is like to diminish, disminuir. And then you also have reducir, so reducir, to reduce.
So once again, crecer in a nutshell. To grow, to grow up, to expand, to spring, to swell. Growth in and of itself is something that is fluid and that's what this verb is all about. That’s why it kind of calls back to a lot of things that you see in nature like rivers and moons, and of course your synonyms: cultivar, madurar, criar, aumentar, subir, I would say, to go up. Versus, your antónimos or your antonyms, disminuir, bajar, reducir. And really the big related noun for crecer is, el crecimiento.
As I mentioned before, I've been really focusing and, and growing certain aspects of, let's just call it my inner world. Um, you know, it's, it's similar to like a Tarantino film set in Disney World. There's a lot of roller coasters, there's a lot of screaming, there's a lot of cursing. Nobody really knows what's going on at any point, and that, that honestly is kind of my mental state these days. So, you know, big, heavy shit. Um, in the “Back to the Future” world, that would be, oh, "That's heavy Doc" because, yeah, it is.
8:01
And the thing about growth is really there's a certain recipe that I've honed, and that really is three different things or questions or concepts I wanted to bring up today. And the recipe for any kind of growth, first of all, it's similar to, like, flour in a cake, and that is motherfucking intention. Before you plant anything, we'll just pull out cultivar as one of the synonyms for crecer, and let's say that you want to go and buy a plant from Lowe's, Home Depot, Home Goods; wherever they sell them.
And you get your plant; okay, what are you going to do with that plant? You need intention behind it. Where's it going to go? What's it good for? What is it used for? We just bought a snake plant. Even though I'm terrified of snakes, this is the first step to getting over my fear of snakes. (Don't worry, there are no snakes in it, just in the name. And that alone kind of frightens me.) It is in the same room as our dog’s crate, and I'm hoping that it just helps clean and purify the air a little bit. It's winter, times are tough; yeah, I know. So that intention or those goals or desired outcomes, they were already established before I was like, oh, I'm going to get a snake plant.
9:30
When you have your goal or your intention and then you couple it with the thing that you're looking to grow, whether that is muscle in the gym and you're trying to work that muscle a little bit, you need the intention, you need the goal behind it, but you also need motivation. And that motivation piece really ties into my second pista, or my second kind of clue as it relates to el crecimiento, growth, and as it relates to, you know, the papa verb of crecer, which is that anytime you grow, it needs time.
It takes way too long than what you would think originally to grow. And with growth, you don't necessarily want to put an end date to it, right? It's not like, oh, we're playing, you know, Mario Kart or something. And, patience with me, because I've never actually played a video game. Um, but it's just like ping pong, bing bong, ping pong. And all of a sudden, we're at the stage and we're like, great. Check that off. We're done growing.
No, there's always something. And that is both exhausting to think about, and that is also one of the best things to think about, because there will always be something to improve upon, to grow, or to live more aligned with what feels good. And that growth, it can be applied to anything.
11:04
It can be applied to your personal growth. Maybe you want to find religion, go to a self-help seminar, read Inc. Magazine or Thrive Global, uh, whichever you choose for kind of that personal growth journey. That growth can also be career growth, right? Moving up a ladder; maybe you don't want to be on the ladder, maybe you want to be on the monkey bars, whatever it is. You're going to be able to grow that. Maybe that growth is related to your social life and the feelings of support and community and socialization, whatever it is that that growth is.
Obviously, you need intention behind it because if you have the intention, that will help the motivation because growth needs motherfucking time, so much time, and that also ties into the intention and motivation. The higher your motivation, the more intention, more patience you have with that time in order to grow what you want or need to grow.
12:17
The third aspect, is really all about the environment. So, after we got our snake plant that is not full of snakes, I promise, and my husband asks, “oh, where are we going to put it?” “Oh, we're going to put it, you know, in the same room as the crate.” “Oh, I hope it's not too much sun.” I was thinking, oh fuck. I forgot that that was a thing. Plants can have too much sun. Every plant needs that environment that is conducive to growth. Sometimes that's sunlight. Sometimes that's space. Sometimes that is being left alone, in comfort.
It really depends on what you're looking to grow or where you're looking to grow, because we've talked a bit about where you can grow, right? You can grow in your career, you can grow in your social relationships, social connections, community. You can grow inwards and growing your personal direction or life or, or what have you. But it also really depends on what you're looking to grow. Not just where, but what are you looking to grow? What does that look like? Are you looking to grow joy? What does that look like? How does that look like in your life? What activities does joy represent? How does joy really translate into your life? The intention, the motivation, all of that kind of changes, right?
14:01
Because growth is fluid. It is something that naturally occurs, and it will continue to naturally occur, so you can grow in different aspects of your life. You can grow certain things, and we tend to think of growing things as like external things, right? Like houses, relationships, weddings, jobs, promotions, children, all of that. But what about growing internally? Because I think that we all need an internal life to live, and sometimes the focus needs to kind of return internally.
It can't all be about what your 1099 or what your tax forms say that your life is. We are not our tax forms.
With growth, and once again, growing intention, motivation, time, and a conducive environment for it; but with growth, you know, calling it out, thinking about this, preparing for this. It was very much like, you know what growth is? It's such a weird kind of icky kind of murky thing. We usually don't know that we are in the murk of it until we've already gone through.
So it's one of those words where I think we each have our own definition. And yes, I can, you know, call out, oh, crecer, significa aumentar el tamaño y/o la cantidad de algo, como ríos, como lunas. Es como aumentar. Otros sinónimos incluyen subir, cultivar, madurar, criar. Más o menos con cosas naturales. Right? Like I can say all of that, but really, we all have our own definitions.
16:00
And going back to the time: it takes so long to get through growth, especially as adults, that you don't even know that you've done it until you look back and you're like, ah, shit. I guess that was growth. Along with that, as adults, and I've seen articles; I myself have Googled this question of like, why does time move differently as an adult versus like high school versus childhood? And really, childhood, you think about those first 10 years and they were formative as fuck, and then the next 10 years were also pretty formative. I mean, I don't know about you, but that's where I made a lot of my life mistakes.
And then the next 10 years, and you're like, oh, I settled into a routine. It's different as an adult versus a child because time moves a little bit differently. It can feel like it's rushing by, you know, the days seem to fly by and it's eight, nine o'clock at night, and I'm going, oh shit. Like, what happened? Time flies by.
Though usually when you're waiting for something, waiting for a call back, waiting for a meeting, waiting for a big event, time kind of seems to stand still, and you're like, great. So, time is moving at half speed and I'm the only one that's like, I want to go. Please let me go. Things are moving too slow.
I think a lot of adulthood is finding the equilibrium between being so excited about something that it feels like everybody is moving at half speed, or feeling so overwhelmed with everything that you feel like you're moving at half speed. And I mean, just probably a good fair bit of brain science behind that. And also it goes down to your perspective and your expectations, but we won't go into that today because really we are focused on crecer.
18:07
El crecimiento, or growth. It's not something that is exponential is, if you're on a graph, is about numbers or logical things. It's not necessarily something that can be expected to grow exponentially, personally, professionally, academically, because it takes so much time, right? There's going to be growth and then there's going to be setbacks, and that is good. So even though the setbacks suck, because let me tell you, they suck. It might feel like constraint. It might feel like descontrol right? You're just, you're out of control. It might feel icky or murky, um, opaque, like you don't know.
To me, because, hello, recovering perfectionist, it looks a lot of, I don't have control over this. It's not to my standards. I don't like having this. And please, can I get off this ride? I will call that a setback. And these setbacks are so important because as you grow, they're going to happen. They happen naturally, right? Nature will check itself, including your ego; it will check itself. So yes, you have that growth, you have that setback. I think then you appreciate the growth more.
You need to have the shit so you can appreciate the good. You need to have the good, so you know what shit looks like. And what shit feels like. (Honestly, it feels like shit.) We all feel growth and shit differently, right? With every growth, there's that shadow side because nature will check itself and it really is the intention, the motivation, and the environment, and that is what you need. That's your engine to keep going, to keep pushing, to keep growing because even when it feels like you aren’t, odds are, you actually are. You just don't know it yet.
20:30
And that is weird. Honestly. It's terrible. It's a weird part of life, but I think that we all have it. We all have those shared feelings of, oh, this doesn't feel good, or, oh, I don't like this feeling of frustration, of constraint, of sadness. Like, why does it feel like the universe is punching me in the ass every single time that I pass it? And really, what it comes down to it, is that's growth. It's so weird. It's so strange, but it is. You just have to trust that process and let it work itself out, and that is the time. It's the time, the intention, the motivation, because that will continue wherever, and whatever you're trying to grow, that will continue to seguir, to subir, to crecer, right?
Because that's what you need in order to push through onto the next step. So I think when we are feeling our biggest areas of discomfort, our biggest feelings of frustration, of sadness, of discomfort, of even rage, it's so important to sit with that, because those feelings are little signals of growth and they're going to keep going until it reaches its end point, its natural end point in your life.
22:19
And then you can look back at that and be like, wow, that sucked. But also, I grew a lot. When in doubt, you really go back to intention. Your intention is like vanilla extract in a recipe; that I personally never measure because I don't think you can ever have too much of it. Obviously not the entire bottle; we can't do that with intention either. But intention is one of those things that when you are going through your day-to-day, you need to have intention behind you.
Your intention will bleed into your motivation. Your motivation helps you confront the time that it takes. Your intention helps you build an environment that is conducive to what feels good. You tap into the feelings that you want to feel, you tap into your goals or your desired outcomes, whatever those are, and you think about those and you visualize them and you feel them. And growth is just going to happen on its own through that process.
23:28
And it's really diving in, especially as we think about learning Spanish. What does that need? That needs intention. Why do you want to learn Spanish? What for? What feelings do you want to feel? Do you want to feel in control of a conversation? Great. Visualize it.
When was the last time you had that immediate click with someone? Think about that. Visualize that in Spanish. And then we have time. It takes way too long. It takes so much time to feel like you have a handle on Spanish, and that is the intention and the motivation.
Why do you want to learn it? You want to feel this certain way? Great. It's going to take this much time. Great. Do it start today because it's going to take X amount of years, months, days, until you get un pedazo, a piece, of what it is that you want to feel, and then of course your environment. You need the sunlight, the space, the comfort in order to grow.
If you are looking to grow Spanish and you need that conducive environment or that environment conducive to growing things, check out Deseo. Check out my monthly program because that combines what I love, brain science, with what is necessary, Spanish grammar, with actual real-world Spanish and all of the wonderful dialects and language and culture and nuances that there are. There's a lot. So if you are looking for Spanish, think about your intention. Define what it means to be fluent or define what it means to feel whatever your goal is. Plan for the time. If you need that conducive environment, hit your gringa up and always circle back with intention.
25:31
So queridos, les dejo aquí. Crecer is necessary. Con cada crecimiento, hay algo, right? With every growth there is something, something to learn from, something to do, something to think about, something to plan for, something to dream, something to avoid. And those are a lot of verbs, and we're just learning un palabra sola this time.
So to check out the show notes, transcript, request a word, or be on the show, check out aprovechar.me. Until next time, un abrazo fuerte.
Gracias otra vez and thank you so much for coming along with me on this ride to Una Palabra Sola. Be sure to check out the show notes for additional worksheets and materials. If you have a word that you would like me to review, please feel free to let me know at aprovecharlanguagesolutions.com. Hasta la próxima vez, until next time