How does your garden grow?
This month - SELECT - is all about making choices. How do you go about making choices? How do you know it’s an easy choice or a hard choice? What information do you gather to be sure your choice is the right one?
This tool is often used as an introduction to coaching activities - a chance to get creative, to move out of the rational thinking brain, and into a more intuitive, feeling state. There are no rights or wrongs - just what you bring to the activity - and so it’s a good place to start your self-directed learning this year.
Instructions
Find yourself a large piece of paper and some coloured pens, pencils or crayons.
Draw the garden of your life - including all the features of a garden you would most enjoy. The features you design represent your choices; choices that may be real (fruit to pick off the branches) or abstract (clearer boundaries with my loved ones). The garden embodies some of your choices and intentions for the year ahead.
You have limited resources - the climate you currently live in, limited water - and as a busy MAMA, probably a limited number of daylight hours to tend to all the features of your garden.
Features could include natural, organic plants and trees. You could also include other manmade features representing something important but qualitatively different to the growing flora. A water feature? A trampoline?!
You may represent you own real garden - or how you would most like it to be. But you could also create an imaginary space.
You may also include plants that need managing, or getting under control (some call them weeds…!). This allows us to fantasise, with some doses of reality thrown in for good measure.
Here’s a template you could start with.
An example
Below, is an example I drew today - the choices that I want to focus on, attend to and help materialise this year. I added some notes to share how these features of my garden are meaningful to me. Features include:
First off - this garden must be easy going, easy to maintain, low pressure. Let’s make life easy for ourselves this year.
There are two large structures - some old fashioned wisdom represented by the tree, and a man-made trellis, representing some designed structure to aid steady growth. I want to bring in both wisdom and growth to my business life this year.
The large bushes at the back represent privacy and boundaries - creating clearer boundaries with certain loved ones and colleagues. Boundaries are there to protect my relationships, rather than shut people out. They are also there to remind me about my capacity in relationship to others.
There are a couple of pots - moveable feasts, things I can move, create new perspectives and views with, add detail in manageable ways.
And then there are some wild flowers to add some simple beauty - cornflowers, poppies, calendula, nasturtiums - that will find their own way, create their own beauty - without the need for structure or maintenance. They also represent a loosening of how things should be, and an acceptance that there will be many things out of my control.
The lawn is an invitation to come and sit with me - in this year of Community for MAMA - a place where we can sit back with a cup of tea, feel our toes on the grass, connected on many levels. A place to have a picnic, to eat outside - al fresco is best.
There are strawberry bushes lining the lawn - planted by my children to help inspire a love of gardening in them too. They can pick the fruits of their labours as we explore and enjoy the garden together.
And at one end, the old tree offers shade on a sunny day. I don’t need the sunshine at all times. Sometimes the shady spots, the darker parts of life, are as or more intriguing. I’m comfortable in the shade.
And at the front - fertile soil for new ideas. I haven’t planted them out yet, they are not flourishing yet. But I want to leave room for more to come in. Who knows what this year will bring…
Some choices I want to bring in, attend to and nurture this year. What will I need to do to bring these features to life, I wonder? What needs to happen to make these choices a reality?
And this was my daughter’s version. It looks a darn sight more fun than mine… more physical activity and the introduction of a sausage dog (good luck with that…). But the strawberries are there too, and some bright skies and birds overheard - and a nest in the tree for them. The gardening tools lined up made me smile - maybe my love of gardening has been absorbed more than I realised…!