Conscious Leaders are Gardeners 🌱👩🏻🌾
Developing conscious leadership means tilling the garden of your mind and spirit
Oftentimes during coaching sessions, clients are confronted by long-held beliefs that have limited their potential or sabotaged their goals. When faced with this truth, it’s like their vision of the world is suddenly broadened. Instead of wearing dim glasses or blinders that limited what they could perceive, they now see endless possibilities that just moments before had never occurred to them. Those are the “ah-ha” life-changing moments that make coaching so powerful.
I recently came across an excellent analogy that describes these beliefs and where they come from. Author Emily Nagoski describes how in her role as a sex educator, she often has to work with young women on the toxic or shameful beliefs they hold around intimacy. And these beliefs are a result of “the families and cultures we’re born into.”
Dr. Nagoski uses the brilliant analogy of a belief garden, which I will share below. As you read through her analogy, think about what’s planted in your garden in the context of being a leader. What cultural or familial ideas were planted in the garden of your mind and spirit that you may need to till and replant?
“On the day you’re born, you’re given a little plot of rich and fertile soil. Slightly different from everyone else’s. And right away, your family and your culture start to plant things and tend the garden for you, until you’re old enough to take over its care yourself. They plant language and attitudes and knowledge about love and safety and bodies and sex. And they teach you how to tend your garden, because as you transition through adolescence into adulthood, you’ll take on full responsibility for its care.
“And you didn’t choose any of that. You didn’t choose your plot of land, the seeds that were planted, or the way your garden was tended in the early years of your life.
“As you reach adolescence, you begin to take care of the garden on your own. And you may find that your family and culture have planted some beautiful, healthy things that are thriving in a well-tended garden. And you may notice some things you want to change. Maybe the strategies you were taught for cultivating the garden are inefficient, so you need to find different ways of taking care of it so that it will thrive. Maybe the seeds that were planted were not the kind of thing that will thrive in your particular garden, so you need to find something that’s a better fit for you.
“Some of us get lucky with our land and what gets planted. We have healthy and thriving gardens from the earliest moments of our awareness. And some of us get stuck with some pretty toxic crap in our gardens, and we’re left with the task of uprooting all the junk and replacing it with something healthier, something we choose for ourselves.”
The reason I share this lengthy passage from Emily Nagoski’s book is because it applies to every area of our lives. The seeds that were planted in the garden of our mind and spirit impact how we work and relate with each other.
As a leader, you have specific plants in your garden that effect how you lead.
Are they thorny weeds that hurt you and those around you?
Or are they lush vegetables and beautiful flowers that help you and others around you thrive?
Do you have the strategies and tools to care for your garden?
Working with a coach is one of the best ways to start assessing what’s in your garden and what needs to be replanted and how to do so.
As you grow as a conscious leader, you will become more aware of what’s planted in your garden and determine how you can till, replant, and grow a thriving, consciously-planted garden of your mind and spirit.
Work happy. Live happy. BE happy.
Meredith
The way we work and build teams is rapidly changing. Leaders often feel unprepared to navigate the transition. As a conscious leadership coach, consultant and communicator, Meredith helps leaders and their teams create new ways of working and relating so they can prepare for the future by consciously co-creating it.
Contact her to develop your conscious leadership and transform your organization into the workplace of the future.
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