You're still performing. Still delivering. Still carrying more responsibility than ever before.

From the outside, your career may look like continuous growth.

But performance and growth are not the same thing.

Many leaders continue to achieve while quietly stopping their own development. Learning becomes expertise. Exploration becomes execution. Curiosity becomes control.

The transition is rarely dramatic. There is no crisis. No failure. No warning light.

Only a gradual shift where growth is replaced by performance.

In this episode of The Forge Conversations, Alain Coadou explores the fourth movement of the FORGE framework: Grow.

Using the metaphor of the garden, this episode examines why sustainable growth depends less on discipline and more on the conditions in which people operate — and what happens when those conditions quietly deteriorate.

Drawing on Self-Determination Theory, one of the most robust models in contemporary psychology, we explore the three psychological needs that sustain human development over time:

Autonomy, the need to be the author of what you do. Competence, the need to keep being extended, not just refined. Relatedness, the need to be known as a person, not just recognized as a function.

Because growth is not something that can be forced. Like a garden, it emerges when the conditions are right.

In this episode: Why successful leaders can gradually stop growing. The difference between performance and development. The science behind Self-Determination Theory. How autonomy shapes motivation at senior level. Why expertise can become a ceiling. The hidden cost of leadership isolation. How to create the conditions for sustainable growth

The FORGE Journey Focus: Recovering clarity. Overcome: Releasing unnecessary burdens. Reinvent: Updating the internal operating system. Grow: Creating the conditions for sustainable development. Excel: Performance as the natural expression of who you have become.

If you recognized something of yourself in this episode, that may be where the real work starts. Alain Coadou is an executive coach and the founder of The Forge Partners. He helps international executives build sustainable excellence: performing under pressure without drifting. Author of Beyond the Drift and L'Excellence Durable. theforgepartners.com

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