Pruning & Growth

Assessing Our Lives

Some people just seem to have a green thumb, and everything they touch seems to prosper and blossom. My wife Carol is one of those folks. She has this daily practice of “dead-heading” the blooms that either aren’t going to make it, or there are just too many in one place. And her plants thrive!

I recently finished Necessary Endings, by Dr. Henry Cloud. It is a wonderfully instructive book, especially for folks like me who try to do too many things simultaneously and end up disappointed because I cannot seem to get them all done. In the second chapter of the book, Dr. Cloud suggests that “pruning is a process of proactive endings”. While I never thought about it much, he tells us that rose bushes and other plants produce more buds than a healthy plant can sustain. In fact, in order for the plant to thrive, systematic pruning has to be done to remove dead or dying buds and branches in order to nurture the plant and optimize its growth.

Using the rose bush as a metaphor for our lives, Dr. Cloud suggests that we assess our lives and prune away whatever is “unwanted or superfluous”—whatever may be getting in the way of us achieving what we desire.

I thought our “paperless society” was going to help end the age-old battle against clutter, but it has only made it worse! Like pruning, Marie Kondo shares her method of de-cluttering in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Her advice is: if it doesn’t spark joy in your life, get rid of it!
In the executive coaching I have done over the years there is so much value in examining the gap between who you are and who you want to become. Trying to be who someone else wants you to be, and working against your natural grain is like expecting a beautiful rose bush without paying any attention to pruning. Developing anything worthwhile is not easy: it requires discipline and diligence to do the necessary work.

Being authentically who you were created to be is one of the greatest privileges of life. When you play to your strengths and harness them to the things in life that you are passionate about, you can flatten the inevitable obstacles that come your way.

Get out the Pruning Shears!                                                   
Here are five things you can do immediately to move forward in the direction of the life you want to create:

1. Do a little personal journaling to identify the things in your life today that are not buds that will blossom, or are dead or unhealthy branches. Also spend some time detailing the things that lift your spirit and align with your dreams, even if you don’t get around to doing them as often as you want.
2. Rank the things you came up with in step one according to the following criteria:
   A: These are things I love to do and I am really good at doing them. Time is irrelevant when I am in the moment doing them. I am not doing them for someone else, I am blissfully doing them for me!
   B: These are activities I must do to pay the bills, maintain the lifestyle for my family, and serve others.
   C: These are actions that really have minimal payoff in my life, and typically are the last things I get around to accomplishing. Cut or prune them away and see if they are essential to your being or they have just become a habit you have managed to become comfortable doing over and over again.
3. Have a frank conversation with the future self you are aspiring to become and decide which are the necessary endings that you need to make in order to revitalize your life.
4. Take action—just do it!
5. Keep track of your actions and evaluate your progress. You may have to bring back an activity or two, or re-rank them. This works best when you are doing a monthly or quarterly self-assessment.

Let me know how it goes!

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