What Gardening Can Teach You About Business
If you’ve been following my newsletter for a while, you’ll know that a lot has happened for me in the last year. I got married in July and moved to San Diego with my husband in November. We found an amazing rental: a quaint brick home with a yard.
Although I won’t lie and say the additional housework hasn’t created more disagreements than I’d like with my husband, it has also been fun creating our new home together — inspiring conversations about the kind of lifestyle we want and what we envision in our environment.
This past weekend we finally got to dive into adding some plants to our raised beds. I’ve never had a garden outside of my feeble (and failed) attempts to keep potted herbs alive. Now I’m fully responsible for 20 sq ft of dirt. Yikes!
Looking through rose-colored glasses
My mother-in-law gave us a wonderful housewarming gift: a credit to a nearby nursery. What a happy place: to be surrounded by the energy of living plants, trying to choose what you want to bring back home.
I spent the afternoon taking small, drought-friendly (cuz, California) flowering bushes carefully out of their pot and planting them into the expansive beds. One of the things we took into consideration was knowing that these now small plants would grow bigger now that they had more space. And this got me thinking…
Plants are like people: the amount by which we grow is proportional to the space we have in our environment. If you put a small aloe plant into a larger pot, it will grow to fit its new pot. But if you keep it in the small pot, it will remain its small pot size for life.
Humans are the same. When given the space to do so, we can flourish beyond our current limits. The important piece to note is we create our own pots, our own environment. We have ultimate power over how much we grow or not.
So the question is, are you keeping yourself in a small pot?
Do you need a bigger pot?
We all have dreams, goals, and a vision for our life. But the biggest barrier to achieving this is fear. Fear of failure AND fear of success.
When we are afraid, our natural inclination is to create an environment that makes us feel safe. However, this means it keeps us small. We adopt unhealthy habits or surround ourselves with people who have similar fears and thus talk us out of anything outside of the self-created ‘norm’.
Sometimes our environments are even toxic. It might seem so silly that we would actually create this for ourselves, but it isn’t the big wise YOU doing it. It is the survival primal unconscious brain doing it.
Business is a bed of roses
I recently heard Tony Robbins say, “We have everything we need to create the solutions to our problems. But we keep our problems around because it meets a core need.”
One core need we may have is certainty. And so even if we are unhappy, we stay in our unhappy environments because it is what we know. Talk about hard truths!
Entrepreneurship is like a big garden to a small potted plant: exciting but also scary! It is a large unknown world. We don’t have the safety of our pot and are now vulnerable to the elements and pests.
But we also get to expand, bloom, and flourish within a greater ecosystem. To fully grow, we also need nutrients and tending to by a nurturing gardener.
Are you ready to bloom?
And if you are going to grow, you need the same support! The only way to overcome fear is to go through it. But you don’t need to go through it ALONE.
What are some ways that you can start to outgrow your flower pot? To name a few: join an entrepreneurial community (join ours here!), take a class in a subject you don’t know about, meditate to train your brain, or hang out with some people you normally wouldn’t think to.
Anything that provides a new perspective and challenges you is a good start. My recommendation is to get mentorship or have a supportive community to keep the morale strong. You do need nutrients after all. 🙂
For some, going from a small pot to a big garden is too overwhelming right now. Well, then start by just upgrading to the next larger size of pot. Incremental change is better than nothing. It is crucial that you give yourself some extra space to flourish. If you stay where you are, you will not grow further.
And take it from the plants: if you’re not growing, you’re dying.
p.s. below is a picture of my cat really enjoying my plant selection!
