For a long time, every time I heard the word “scaling,” something in my body contracted.
It felt mechanical. Like... Push, push, push. Grow, grow, grow. Go, go, go. A very strong, borderline toxic energy of you must scale the thing because it’s growing. I never resonated with that.
And then I sat down to interview a man — a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold several companies from scratch, and now works as a fractional CTO and CFO for companies growing to 20 million, 100 million, and beyond.
What struck me immediately was that when he spoke about scaling, his body didn’t tighten.... His language was soft, alive, vibrant.
I had to ask him to share his philosophy on growth and scaling.
What unfolded blew me away.
He described growth as a little seed in the earth. A seed that needs the right environment in order to sprout and grow into a big oak tree. Like an oak tree that cannot help but grow. It will do exactly that — it will grow — when it has the right conditions: the right weather, the right amount of sun, the right amount of water, a good kind of soil.
And then he said something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about...
“Celinne, you can’t pull growth. You can’t reach down into the seed and pull it out into a tree. You can only create the conditions for that growth to happen. And the better the conditions, the faster and easier it will become.
He walked me through what those conditions actually are inside a company — the offer, the people, the vision, the systems holding the whole thing up. Specific, practical, and so different from the push, push, push doctrine I’d been hearing my whole career.
This wasn’t only a business teaching. It was a teaching about how anything grows.
The reason most high-achieving leaders I know are exhausted isn’t because they aren’t doing enough.... It’s because they’ve been trying to pull a tree out of a seed for years. Pulling at their business, their relationships, and themselves to be more, do more, become more — faster, harder, sooner.
And the result is the same as it would be in nature: the thing either dies, or it grows in spite of you and despite the pulling. Rarely because of it.
The leaders I watch scale with grace — in their work and in their lives — aren’t pushing harder than everyone else. They’re paying attention to what their ecosystem actually needs. They’re asking a different question. (I touched on this from another angle in You’ve Done the Work. So Why Hasn’t the Pattern Shifted? — effort alone is rarely what moves the needle.)
In today’s audio training, I walk through the actual conditions he named need to be present for a company to successfully scale, what each one looks like in practice — in a company, in a life, in a relationship — and the specific question to ask yourself anytime you notice you’re pulling on something instead of tending it. I also share what shifts when you finally stop trying to drag growth out of places it wasn’t ready to come from.
If you’ve been pushing hard on something and the return isn’t matching the effort — this is for you.
TAKEAWAY: You can't pull growth. You can only create the conditions for it.
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