7 Lessons I learned from my Summer Garden

During this time of great upheavals, there are many lessons to learn that impact our future ability to adapt and thrive in our work and lives. Businesses have experienced a sudden loss of income and job creation has stagnated in many areas. A sneeze can provoke a glare or hostile stare and people are either afraid of each other or being reckless about socialization instead of practicing caution.

 What are we to do to move forward? How can we begin to see better days ahead you might ask?

 For some of us, there is a frantic effort to keep going and maintain the status quo. Some of us work more and more hours to maintain our businesses. For others, we feeling hopeless and experiencing anxiety...making only a marginal effort at work.

But there is another approach, a middle path so to speak...

I learned some valuable lessons from having a summer garden that have helped me enormously. I’d like to share some of the key lessons that have helped me keep my momentum going and thrive during a difficult time.

 A garden starts with a plan. This year because of all the uncertainty, my partner and I decided to plant a very large garden, which was an enormous undertaking. During all the months of planting, weeding, harvesting and processing our food, I kept thinking about the problems created by the pandemic and how to solve them.

Here are some of the garden lessons that I would like to share with you:

 1  Planning:  A garden project, like a business plan, needs to be detailed. We learned from last year that certain plants need more sun, more topsoil or to be separated from other plants. We decided to plant over 100 different crops this year for diversity and learning. Mono-cropping we learned is only economically beneficial for very few farmers and comes at a high cost for the environment. I ask myself? Are we planting monocrops as professionals by being so incredibly niche in our focus and skill-sets? Is it time to expand and diversify, especially if your current “crops” aka product or service is not yielding customers due to economic turmoil. If you want to maintain or even grow your business, how will you do it? This is an important question to ask as you prepare your plan. Will you have new “crops” to yield other revenue streams or stay with the same crops as last year but work to increase their taste (appeal) and yield (revenue)?

 2  Sowing: It is always incredible to witness tiny seed growing into large fruit bearing plants. Be careful which seeds you sow to rebuild your business or career and how often you tend to them. For business owners, are you calling your client too often or not enough; or not offering a compelling value proposition (seed) for them to consider if they need your service? Are you sowing only one kind of seed in difficult soil that may not grow? Are you providing the things it needs to grow well like sun and water… or for business - a strong relationship built on trust and a mutual respect with regular value added contact?

 3  Weeding: During the summer the weeds became terrible. In fact, one day I told my partner that I needed to take a break from the garden as it was getting to be too much work. But the weeds were choking out our plants and if we didn’t take time to pull them out, our harvest would suffer or even be killed. Luckily, I have a supportive partner who understood my negative emotions and gave me love and support while he carried on pulling weeds. I was feeling overwhelmed- little contact with staff and friends, no gym or swimming pool to de-stress and the worries about my family and business. It wasn’t until I realized that these negative feelings were my “weeds” that I challenged my emotions and reminded myself to be grateful and keep going. As I plucked out my own weeds, I felt my energy and fighting spirit returning. I returned to the garden and saw the irony of how pulling weeds allowed our plants to thrive. We need to all get rid of your own weeds so our work and lives can thrive again. Let’s stop feeling overwhelmed in small steps and focus on rebuilding momentum towards our goals. Your weeds could be self-limiting beliefs, a difficult client, loneliness or bad habits like eating too much junk food or not exercising. Whatever your weeds are right now, identify them and rip them out of your life!

 4  Learning new Techniques in the garden: This year I learned how to pickle, ferment and properly store vegetables and how to make delicious sauce from our incredible tomato crop. Our many new crops, like chickpeas, required new techniques to be learned and we have started saving the seeds for next year. I learned that onions are biannuals so by leaving some of our last year onions in the ground, we witnessed beautiful mid-summer flowers which yielded hundreds of perfect black seeds. All these new techniques boosted my confidence as a gardener and increased my enjoyment of our garden. I applied the lesson of learning new techniques to my Talent Solutions Company and have spent the summer learning and working on the business. I updated my client records, improved my understanding of Mailchimp, Squarespace and Zoom. I developed new courses and presentation content for our training division and it felt great. I encourage you to focus on learning in order to help you build a successful future. What areas of your business can you improve through training?

 5  Enjoying the Bounty: Sometimes in gardening, like in life, we get into work, work, work mode and forget to celebrate each day. When you bite into a fresh cucumber or savour a fresh bean, pea or tomato, you realize that it is worth all the effort. I made sure to enjoy the bounty from our summer garden by trying out new recipes each week with our veggies like deep fried eggplant, homemade Caesar salad with our romaine lettuce, delicious spicy pasta with our tomatoes, peppers and garlic and many delicious potato and squash dishes. When it comes to our work, we need enjoy our bounty as well. Like celebrating a project completed with a lunch, genuinely admiring work we have done or thanking a helpful co-worker, family member or friend. Each week, we need to find something to call our bounty and celebrate it sincerely. It might be spending time with family or a nice hike. Set aside time each day to celebrate your efforts by celebrating in a meaningful way.

 6  Storing Food from the garden: For our garden, we are building a cold-cellar and learning how to store food like squash and potatoes over the winter. We are all used to having grocery stores to provide a large and diverse supply of food and we have refrigerators and freezers to store it. But learning to store up during tough times is still a good lesson. When my father was young, his family was very poor as he grew up during World War 2. His family had a large vegetable garden and a cold cellar in the basement. If they didn’t learn how to properly store food in the winter, they wouldn’t have enough to eat. I remember him telling me how he learned to store potatoes in sand and how one year he allowed the potatoes to touch each other causing rot. This meant his family didn’t have enough potatoes for the winter and he never forgot the lesson. It is always a good lesson to store up during difficult times. We can reduce our overheads and expenses and learn to do things ourselves instead of outsourcing. We can avoid overspending personally. What areas of your business and home life can you take care of by storing up this Fall?

 7  Saving and using your own seeds: The miracle of gardening is the same as the miracle of life. Despite our moods, our doubts, the weather set-backs and predators of all kinds, there is always an incredible bounty if you put in the hard work. What I learned from my experience as a gardener is that the seeds we have with us already are the best ones to plant for a new season ahead. This year for the first time, we used seeds that we saved ourselves last Fall. They didn’t come from a store or a package, they came from our own plants. Those seeds produced the freshest and tastiest fruit.  I believe that using our own seeds applies to our work and life efforts as well. What “seeds” or talents do you possess that you can use to build success for next season? Think of what you are naturally good at, what you are passionate about, what interests you have. Then blend those “seeds” with your efforts. How can you grow the members of your own team to maximize their success. Plant your own seeds regularly and make sure to follow up with nurturing care. My firm has grown in unexpected and exciting ways because I used my own “seeds” instead of doing what everyone else is doing.

 Having a summer garden has been enormously rewarding. Even though the work is significant, the joy is great as well. The garden taught me many lessons but first and foremost it taught me about the balance of all season. As professionals, we need to find the balance between the push to succeed and the joy of the journey, so that we can maintain momentum and plant the seeds of success in future seasons.

 “Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished” Lao Tzu

“ To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow” Audrey Hepburn

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 Patricia (Tish) Conlin is a Talent Solutions firm owner, Speaker and Coach, with over twenty years as President of Global Consulting Group Inc. She is a Certified Emotional Intelligence Trainer, Registered Holistic Nutritionist, Black Belt Martial Artist and author of ABCs of Food: Boost Your Energy, Confidence, and Success with the Power of Nutrition. She is currently working on her second book and on-line course about leadership and resilience.

 Visit TishConlin.com  to energize your performance and life with our on-line training programs and courses.