The Growth Hub

Ideas, tools, support and inspiration to realize your goals, purpose and potential, No Matter What

Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

The Mountain Without a Top

“It’s not the mountain we conquer but ourselves,” Sir Edmond Hillary famously said after the first successful ascent of Mt. Everest in 1953. I got thinking about…

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

Skydiving Everest for a Cause

The highest skydive “drop zone” in the world is on Mt. Everest; my friend and colleague Mike Sarraille is about to make an attempt at it to honor Extortion 17. I want us all to go along for the ride (virtually anyway)…

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

Why the Color Black?

I wear a lot of black. Maybe you’ve noticed all our gear is in black and it’s a major branding theme; it’s not a mistake. Don’t worry, this isn’t the next fashion blog…

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

What I learned from the Shipibo

We’re literally in the middle of the Amazon Jungle. No cell phones, no restaurants, no emergency services. Just a small camp surrounded by forest as dense as you can possibly imagine and all the countless creatures that live in it. I’m with the Shipibo people, an ancient indigenous group in the Amazon Rainforest, primarily in Peru…

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

Why Hunt Discomfort When There’s Easy?

You could win the lottery. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And there’s always crypto. It seems like it’s easy to achieve success, at least the financial kind. And happiness is an inside job, right? Why then, would you need to hunt discomfort? Those ways seem much more palatable. You’re right. There might be…

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

Think Bigger To Your Next Breakthrough

Breakthroughs are often seen as the result of small iterations, consistent effort, and little steps forward. After-all, it’s usually hard, time consuming and maybe even expensive, to fight the status quo of your company culture to change and/or deal with existing market conditions and/or challenges that come up every day.

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

The Key to “Unsolvable” Challenges

Some things can’t be changed. They’ve either already happened or they’re immovable, immutable things. Maybe there’s something about yourself, your situation or your history that you’re convinced makes your true aspiration a seeming impossibility. And when challenges look unsolvable, that probably stops you from taking steps towards them, right?

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

Don’t be a Chicken: 6 Ways to Know You’re Not Seeing Clearly

A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in the nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them. All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled.

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

How to Tune your Brain to Look for Breakthroughs

Breakthroughs aren’t automatic. If they were, they wouldn’t be the sudden, dramatic and usually important quantum leaps that they can be. Our brains aren’t tuned for breakthroughs, they’re tuned for survival — surprise! You probably already knew that. But there is a way to tune them…

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

2 Steps to Determine What's Right

There’s misinformation out there. Scare tactics. Emerging technology worries that might disrupt your whole business or life. What does it all mean and how do we know what’s right? Or, at least what’s right for us?

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

Don’t make McGregor’s Mistake

Going down with a broken leg in the first round, Conor McGregor lost his second UFC mixed martial arts fight to Dustin Poirier as millions watched around the world…I have a decidedly different perspective of what went wrong for McGregor — and it’s a mistake every single one of us can fall victim to in business and in life.

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

The Tragedy of Self-Doubt & What to do About it

Self doubt is an indulgence in questioning oneself. It’s the no-man’s-land of indecision between belief and disbelief. You know the feeling. Tightness in your chest, your face flushes as you wrestle with questions and insecurities in your mind, maybe a visceral sense of …

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

The Cost of Making Things that Matter

There’s a cost to making things that matter that’s easy to overlook. In a world of shortcuts, fast-lanes and hacks it is perhaps the least obvious answer. But if you want to create something meaningful in your company or in your life, it’s absolutely necessary…

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

39 Lessons in my 39 Years

There are 39 things that I’ve learned in my 39 years that have made a huge difference in my business and life. I just celebrated my birthday, now stepping into the last year of my 30s! (yes, I think worthy of an exclamation mark). Every year at about this time, I reflect on…

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

The Contagion of Beliefs

Beliefs about what can and can’t be accomplished might be the easiest thing to catch from one another. They can be transferred via voice, text, audio and/or visual, and shape how we see the world. The acceptance of statements to be true or false…

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

Two Words to Change Your Life

Can two words change your life? If you use them correctly. I know, you might be thinking: “Sterling, #NoMatterWhat may be a hashtag, but that’s technically three words”. But just stick with me and hear this out…

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

4 Ways to Identify a Problem Culture (and How to Fix it)

Let’s be real, “culture” is one of those nebulous words that’s hard to put your finger on exactly what it is. The dictionary defines it as “the set of values, ethics and beliefs held by a certain group”. Ok, well how do we identify those things? And how come sometimes the values or beliefs we say we have and post up on our conference room walls, aren’t always what we’re actually living by?

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Sterling Hawkins Sterling Hawkins

The Mindset Myth

We all run into challenges at some point in our life. And when you did, did you ever hear: “Just change your mindset!”, “Ahh, you need an empowered mindset.” or “It’s a positive mindset that you need.” Do these comments sound familiar? I don’t believe in mindsets. At least not in the way that pop-culture interprets them. There’s something far more powerful at play here…

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