What is Harmonized Growth™?
Harmonized growth is an integrative approach to change - one that works with the nature of humans. It's a paradigm shift from relying on ‘coping’ and ‘quick fixes’. It goes beyond growth mindset and works with and through the resistance that comes with the nature of humans.
"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better"
- Albert Einstein
Harmonized growth is an integrative approach to change that works with the nature of humans.
Nature that is both primal and transformational. To sustain healthy and growing changes, we have to loosen the tethers to the past and reset the feedback in the present that pulls us back. We identify how the changes we want – for ourselves, in our families, at our workplaces, in whatever level of society is your context – are connected to us so we see our paths of strongest influence. This is where the rational linear thinking mind can trip us up! Humans, like all nature, are not linear.
Harmonized growth is a paradigm shift from relying on ‘coping’ and ‘quick fixes’.
It flips ‘command and control’ to ‘collaborate and innovate’. We balance long term and short needs so you can have lasting results rather than the domino effect of creating a new and bigger problems. It’s inclusive of medical model of care and not constrained by it. It’s inclusive of change management models and not limited by them.
Harmonized growth goes beyond growth mindset.
It includes the whole human, the system within and around. Quick fix solutions can be evidence based – a patterned outcome of the ‘average response’ across people. Yet none of us is the average! Following harmonized growth, we use all the great evidence and expertise out there. With one addition. You are the expert of you. You understand the potential for you in your system, as it’s functioning now. You observe and adapt as you grow forward. You are not a failure when a change doesn’t work; you are a self leader, learning more about your system and modifying the experiment using the new information.
Harmonized growth works with and through the resistance that comes with the nature of humans.
It’s natural to encounter resistance from within yourself as well as around you. For each target of change there is a system that supports it being the way it is. Most of which we don’t pay attention to. It doesn’t matter if you’re targeting an undesired habit, a health problem, your child’s behavior, the politics at work, industries that stay stuck in old paradigms despite new information. They are all subject to human nature; the full experience that is to be expected as humans.
COMMON CHALLENGES
Although the model of change can be applied broadly, here are the most common entry points. If you, like many ISG clients, are looking for a fresh approach to persistent challenges, let’s get connected.
An increasing number of physical symptoms and disorders have no medical explanation. Yet the distress and symptoms are real! By understanding the interconnections between physiology and psychology, new paths to resolution are apparent and effective. Emotional health is an often overlooked contributing factor, as is understanding root causes such as nervous system functioning and energetic imbalances.
Similarly, there’s messaging of a ‘mental health crisis’. Which is confusing as we come out of an unprecedented experience of a global pandemic, not to mention the inconsistency and fear-focused approach to managing it. Our inner systems navigated an extended period of time in a natural threat response. It is natural that we are dysregulated and struggle to settle into a new equilibrium! It’s an opportunity to restore the wounds and experience life changing growth.
BENEFITS OF HARMONIZED GROWTH
Although the model of change can be applied broadly, here are the most common entry points. If you, like many ISG clients, are looking for a fresh approach to persistent challenges, let’s get connected.
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What is the Safe and Sound Protocol?Developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, founder of the Polyvagal Theory, the Safe and Sound Protocol from Unyte is a non-invasive acoustic vagus nerve stimulator that helps your clients connect with themselves, others, and the world from a foundation of physiological safety.
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Will I experience the listening of SSP?In the suite of ISG services, SSP mentoring does not include any listening to the SSP. Our belief is that a healthy, supportive surround that matches your current functioning is essential to a safe and transformative experience with the SSP. Providers who want to experience the SSP in the context of Shelly's harmonized growth coaching model can pursue Individual Coaching.
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What will we talk about?Topics can range from deepening understanding of theoretical concepts, clinical guidance on integrating the SSP into practice (with top-down behavior-based modalities or other body-up modalities), clinical case consultation, or guidance and decision process for integrating SSP into business process.
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ISG QualificationsShelly Melroe, ISG Founder, was one of the first providers to incorporate the Safe and Sound Protocol into mental healthcare for restoration from developmental trauma. She currently uses it with individuals, couples, and families across a broad range of treatment goals, including resolution of chronic pain, addictive behaviors, narcissistic/codependent dynamics, and cross-generational trauma. She is a Certified Remote Provider and Endorsed Mentor by Unyte. You can watch the Provider Spotlight by Unyte, during which Shelly discusses her approach to bringing curiosity to psychophysiological restoration using the SSP with Unyte Clinical Director Rebecca Knowles. In addition to this clinical expertise, Shelly integrates expertise from decades of coaching and facilitating organizational change initiatives into the guidance of how to incorporate a new paradigm and new interventions into your practice.
THE PARADIGM
Stress and challenges are a natural part of living, providing stimulus for growth in yourself and others.
You are not broken. You, your kids, your partner, your team do not need fixing. Your anxiety, overwhelm, exhaustion, desire to hide and whatever else you are experiencing is a natural artifact of living in your world. A world full of messages of fears and inadequacies, compounding distress of unknowns, and intensifying expectations of contradictory societal norms.
Timelines, goal-setting, and old-fashioned ‘sucking it up’ don’t work like they used to. In fact, we’re experiencing the domino effects of decades of systems working against human nature.
And there’s a path to you feeling better, being a leader in growth for yourself and those that matter most to you, while the world stays tumultuous.
THE VIEW
SEE THE SYSTEM
Regardless of if the target system is individual health, child development, stability in our communities, business success, or health of the planet. The commonality is that they are human systems.
See the parts of the human system within and around the challenge and the whole. Nothing and no one is isolation. Even if you have cut-off or withdrawn from others, they continue to influence. In human nature, absence matters as much as presence.
See the parts and the whole, as it is; not as it ‘should be’. Remove blinders, judgment, and filters. It can be difficult – counter to your current mental models. It’s like seeing the forest AND the trees. See the garden AND the flowers, weeds, soil, and sunshine that all matter. Dandelions can be a nuisance or a source of nutrition, depending on your systemic view.
SEE THE DYNAMICS
More important than who and what are in the systemic view, what happens between them matters most. See the dynamics between and within the key elements of the system.
Sure, flowers need soil. Yet there’s a dynamic…not all flowers grow in all soil. We take these things for granted in the nature around us yet miss the same nature is within us. A primary difference is that humans also have, as part of our nature, creativity and problem solving abilities, that can intentionally foster transformation and growing. When we’re not stuck.
Individuals: thinking-feeling-acting, external stimulus and internal stimulus, physiological and psychological
Relationships: dynamic exchange between people and the dynamics within each person
SET PRACTICAL EDGES
Naturally we can’t take on the whole of the whole! Confidently identify the edges of the system for the identified challenge. AND maintain awareness of what’s beyond the edges...
it may matter more than you think which you’ll be open to learning. Anyone who has meticulously cared for their yard knows the interconnection to how a neighbor cares for theirs.
Understand how to expand and contract for each challenge. Continual learning is your guide. You have not failed with something doesn’t work. There’s a natural reason it went the way it did. Follow the trail and accept change is a process.
PRINCIPLES
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To effectively solve a challenge, first understand it. This includes the implicit aspects of the situation – the feedback loops within and around you.
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The dynamics that hold you in unhealth (individually, relationally, or in your work) hide in plain sight. What’s within and around both matter.
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You are the expert of you.
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You can understand you better than anyone else can. There are things about your inner functioning that only you can know. A base challenge: You’ve lost trust in you.
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Others know stuff too. They are just not the expert of you.
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What others know is helpful to you. Some have expertise from studying and learning about a subject. Others have access to their inner wisdom (just like you have to yours) and learning about this is invaluable to change that involves them. Others see you through a lens you may not have from within you. A base challenge: discerning what to trust from whom, when.
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Humans are complex, not complicated. Going beyond cause-effect thinking, is do-able and game-changing. ISG makes it easier.
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Work with human nature rather than against it.
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Bringing change to others is first an inside job. You affect others and others affect you in ways you do not realize. It takes more than telling others what to do. The first step towards all the wellness you envision around you is to instill harmonized growth within you.
THE HARMONIZED GROWTH PROCESS
The core harmonized growth process has four steps, conducted iteratively until resolution is attained. Yet the perspective is that there will always be a next challenge and we use everything that’s been learned to apply to the next one.
ISG provides offerings to support you through the initial learning curve, the ongoing application, as well as providing deeper root cause solutions to inner growth.
Discover
Orient to harmonized growth™ and it’s potential to simplify and improve your approach to the challenges in your work and life.
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Free video introduction to the Harmonized Growth Primer course.
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Complete the HG Primer course.
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Learn more about the principles of Harmonized Growth in this ebook.
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Check out the Resource Library for articles and case studies.
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To stay informed about future short courses, sign up for newsletter.
THE ORIGIN OF HARMONIZED GROWTH
Harmonized growth™ is an assimilation of evidence-based methods and decades of practical applications within human systems from mental health services to global organizational change. Human nature is human nature. Let’s start appreciating it and working with it to grow forward.
Through research reviews and synthesis of foundational theories and methods, ISG founder, Shelly Melroe, has systematized an approach to make the best of the best of our understanding and potential of human systems accessible for everyday use.
“Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.”
~ George Box, Pioneer of Statistical Methods
THE FOUNDATIONAL PILLARS
Learn more about each foundational pillar by clicking on the pillars or visiting our Foundations of Harmonized Growth page.
Harmonized Growth™ is an approach grounded in seven evidence-based pioneering concepts. They are not necessarily new chronologically, but each served and serves to provide a new perspective, a new paradigm of understanding. They are rooted in the observation of phenomena that did not fit the prevailing framework in it’s discipline. Harmonized Growth ™ is an integration of these and a continuation of the spirit of discovery and synthesis.
By staying open to new understanding, we accelerate the growth of human systems. When we are threatened by new information and different perspectives, we constrain it. Both are natural. Only growth moves us forward, towards wellness and vitality.