Spring Thinking – Preparing for Summer Growth

When someone asks “What do you do?” what’s the tenor of your response? I don’t mean the content, but the tone. Are you upbeat and excited? Or is your response flat and bored?

For years, my response was genuinely enthusiastic. I talked about it with passion. About a year ago, I noticed myself saying the same old thing in a new, uninspired way. That made me take a closer look at what I was doing and, more importantly, how I felt about it.

It was a kind of Spring Thinking and, like Spring Cleaning for my yard, it required that I assess the garden after a long dormant period and set about cleaning it up. I raked the (business) debris, pruned the dead wood, planted seeds and otherwise prepared for the blooming season.

It was the best thing I’ve done in years – for myself and for my clients.

To do this yourself, which I would insist if I knew you better, requires that you be willing to eliminate or phase out the work that’s no longer rewarding and plan for new work that is.

To follow the metaphor, stop picking the low-hanging fruit – those projects that are easy to get, have been filling your basket for years, but may be past their prime. Instead, prune the tree to cultivate branches that will bear an abundance of ripe fruit.

If you do this, you’ll be surprised by all the opportunities for growth you didn’t see before.

Here’s what you can do to make your tree, or entire garden, thrive:

Juicy Fruit
List the juiciest projects you’ve been involved in over the past years – you know, the ones that really fueled you. These can be work or volunteer projects, professional or personal activities. Catalog the ones that energized you the most.

Current Crop
What’s in your garden now? How did you spend your time over this past year? What were your big projects – those that took a lot of your time, talent and attention? Catalog these.

How Does Your Garden Grow?
Now compare the two. Did you spend your time this past year on the juiciest projects? Or were you tending a garden full of things you don’t even like? This is really important since many of us are wasting our energy on work that doesn’t feed our soul.

Pruning
Every spring for years, in my real-world garden, I did a hard pruning to my Hydrangea tree. And every year I thought I’d gone too far and killed it. But every single summer it sprouted bigger, greener, more abundant leaves and flowers.

This is what you must do in your metaphorical garden. Cut away the dead wood so the work you want will have a place to grow. Be deliberate about this. Revisit your catalog of juicy fruit and figure out how to grow more of that now.

You know what happens when you leave your yard unattended for any length of time. You can see the damage – the way that invasive plants take over and choke the life out of plants you love. Don’t let that happen to your work or your life.

Start now with a bit of Spring Thinking to see breakthrough growth.