Nurturing the Soil
My favorite leadership lessons have come from my garden. It’s in the dirt that I’ve been able to take theoretical leadership principles and watch them come to life in a way that gently guides me into becoming a better leader. It’s here that I’m learning the importance of having a plan/strategy to create balance, synergy, and layers. I’ve learned how to pair different colors and textures with one another to create a place that is welcoming and inviting. I’ve also learned about structural supports that I need for my little space to thrive against the elements of the high mountain desert in Utah. It teaches me that implementing a new strategy or vision takes time and constant assessment.
Patience is, after all, one of the garden’s best lessons.
I’ve also learned that even the best plans are no match for living, growing things. You must be flexible as living things will give you clues as to what you didn’t understand in your strategy before. For instance, when researching plants, you must pay attention to the plant’s ability to handle your climate and your soil type. You also need to know of the plant’s watering needs, ability to handle sun, and spacing needs. However, even with all this information, sometimes, you put the plant in the ground and it either dies out or it grows bigger than the plant tag said it would. I liken this to hiring new employees. Sometimes their resume and job qualification seem perfect – and yet, they can still very much surprise you.
The question is, what are you going to do to adapt to that?
My current garden is entering its 4th season. This means that the plants I put in when I moved to this new space have either taken off and are thriving or have died off. Most of my garden is thriving and it brings me great joy and satisfaction. However, I have a couple of trouble spots in my garden. After watching plants dwindle in the first season, I changed out the plants. I thought to myself that maybe I just didn’t understand what that plant needed. As in I needed to grow in my knowledge as a gardener and/or maybe I had picked the wrong plant to grow there. At the end of the next season, the new plants were also struggling. So, I went back to my strategy board and chose to increase the amount of water that went to that area. I thought, if it wasn’t a me problem (since the other plants in the garden are thriving) or a problem with the specific plants, then it must be a structural issue. However, by the end of that season, even with the watering increased, the plants were still struggling. With the beginning of this new season, I’ve had to admit to myself that the problem was deeper –
it was in the soil itself.
As I’ve been changing out the soil in these areas, I’ve reflected on the personal work I’ve had to do this last year to recover from grief and burnout. Initially, I thought that a change of scenery might solve my problems. I wanted to blame most of my struggles on the environment I had built around myself as an entrepreneur. I thought that if I switched out the “plants” around me, perhaps I’d be able to recover. When my burnout got worse, I thought that maybe I needed more structure and so I signed up for a master’s program with Harvard… (Yeah, I’ll let you fill in the blanks there). Last November, I hit a breaking point. I was completely overwhelmed with school and all the underlying emotions that wanted to surface, but I didn’t know how to process.
I’m grateful to my therapist and husband who nurtured me through those rough few weeks. They were in many ways, helping me change out my soil. Instead of trying to tackle my struggles with surface level “fixes,” I needed to do the much harder work of nurturing the ground I was trying to grow in. This meant that for the first time in my life, I was forced to look inward at my own wants, needs, feelings, and emotions. I’ve had to learn and validate that noticing and naming my emotions is more helpful than suppressing them. I’ve had to be better at speaking up for my needs even when they inconvenience others. (Boundaries are HARD!) I’ve had to practice asking for social support even though the disappointment of a rejection can cause me to spiral.
I wish I could say my soil was completely fertile again, but there are still some days when I feel like I’m wilting. Honestly, the physical effects of burnout may be something I have to carry with me for the rest of my life. Here’s the other thing though, I needed the lessons involved with trying to get better. I did need to change my environment and I did need more structure. Although both circumstances played a large role in my spiral to rock bottom, I see many blessings in the fact that I closed my business to recover and then have been able to rely on classes to give me additional teachings in how to heal. Just as with my garden, if I look at those first plants, the truth of the matter is I was naïve as a gardener and those plants wouldn’t have been happy there. I needed to switch out the plants. Also, there wasn’t enough water in those areas. Those issues needed to be addressed. Now that we have nurtured the soil, those surface level “fixes” can actually help the plants thrive again. However, without rich, fertile soil, those surface level approaches would never be enough.
As I work on nurturing the soil within me, I’m looking forward to the new living things that will take root and help me grow moving forward. I’m also trying to remember that soil can get depleted and needs to be recharged and refreshed from time to time. It’s not ok to ask it to continually give (just look at the Dust Bowl of 1935). Working on the soil is backbreaking work but is necessary if you want to have a lush, long-term garden. Working on ourselves is just as difficult but is necessary if we want to live an abundant and balanced life.
Thanks for being here today. I hope you find a lesson in the soil near you soon.