Cultivating Growth: Embracing Bold Transformation
Discover the tools to stay committed to your growth and believe in big things for yourself. Embrace a gardener's mindset and reconnect with your younger self to achieve bold transformation.
Welcome to My Substack and Welcome to June!
In today’s edition:
Reflections on growth vs transformation
The tool you need to stay committed to your growth
The tool you need to believe in big things for yourself
A Year of Bold Leaps and Transformation
This week marks a year since I committed to running my business full time and left the perceived safety of being employed at the Civil Service. It has been a huge time of growth and transformation. I’ve been thinking about how private the growth stages to get here have been. Transformation does not happen overnight and it’s required a lot of befriending myself (working out my needs, accessing my creativity and strengths) and believing in myself (accessing inner wisdom to keep me on my path and connected to my WHY) to get there. These have contributed to me being able to take bold leaps and grow through the challenges to get me to where I am today, supporting visionary clients to re-write their definition of success and transition with power and purpose. Today, I want to share two essential tools to help you access your wisdom and inspire your strategy for taking the next leap through growth and transformation.
Navigating the Weeds of Growth
Growth has been important this year because there has been a hell of a lot to learn. When you’re in the weeds (the daily grind of living and creating something), you might not have sight of the transformation but you can feel the aches, pains, and joys of the growth. Taking a huge leap into a new world or industry requires honing your craft, adapting to new surroundings, and adopting new ways of thinking and being. As someone who can be incredibly impatient and hard on myself when things don’t happen immediately, I’ve had to adopt new perspectives to help me grow into the transformation I seek.
Inviting a Gardener’s Mindset (without gardening…)
And, whilst my actual garden is somewhat wild and in need of some love, I have taken inspiration from gardeners to develop the mindset I need to persevere. A gardener is what resonated with me because I’m secretly quite jealous of the qualities they have to create mastery, and sometimes you really can find what you need in those you are somewhat in awe of or even just a little jealous of (Check out my FREE Values Discovery Guide here to find what values you need to call in).
Qualities of the Gardener
Inviting a gardener’s mindset to support growth has supported me to hold faith in my journey because of these 4 gardener qualities:
Patience: They plan for the seasons and nurture soil, carefully plucking weeds whilst they await the fruits, herbs, and flowers of their labor.
Trust: A mixture of hope and faith that things will evolve if you give them what they need, and that putting the work in matters because the enjoyment, beauty, and ecosystem they are creating matters.
Respect: The gardener respects the seasons, knows that dark days make good seasons, and knows that it can make good use of the downpours. After all, weeds can be pulled out a hell of a lot more easily after the rain than in the blazing sun.
Commitment: The gardener holds on to the long-term vision of what they are creating and keeps on keeping on. They plan, respond, tinker, and problem-solve. Climbing roses are supported with a trellis, neighbors’ lawn mowers are borrowed, and tree surgeons are brought on board where they are needed.
Embracing the Gardener’s Qualities
Intentionally inviting in the gardener’s mindset has been important for me because it’s allowed me to put one step forward whilst trusting that my work is headed somewhere exciting; it’s allowed me to not let bad days define me; and it’s given me permission to bring in experts to elevate myself (Coaches, Financial advice, an amazing Acupuncturist).
Who can support you to Grow? Finding Your Metaphor
The gardener worked for me but I wonder what you need to support you with the changes you are seeking? When we are leaping into something new, it can be helpful to ask yourself:
What is the mindset I currently hold about this?
What is an alternative mindset that could better serve me? (If you’re stuck, remember to claim my Free Values Discovery Guide to help get clear on what you need.)
What qualities and values does this mindset represent?
What is a structure or metaphor or image that can represent this mindset? E.g., the gardener!
Believing in Big Things for Yourself
Confidence and clarity to take a leap and nurture it are not just about choosing to invite certain qualities. What we see when we walk into the blooming Summer garden of our friend since we last visited in December is not the aches and pains and joys of their growth, it’s bold transformation. They had a dream and they tirelessly went for it. And whilst we know the qualities they must have shown to get there: patience, trust, respect, commitment—I know that they also needed to have believed in a beautiful garden for themselves to keep on keeping on all of this time, and to have believed they could invite in the qualities of a gardener in themselves.
Inviting Big Dreams
So whilst growth might keep us responding and evolving as life unfolds, how is it that we can be so bold as to invite in the question of “Hey, you get to create something beautiful with this life, what will it be?”. When we’re out of survival mode (Sidenote - survival mode is hard, and creating space to navigate out of it is a whole other space I love supporting clients through. More on this another time!), we can all change how we spend our days and choose to grow to some extent, but how can we audaciously hold big dreams for ourselves? The truth is, without a magnetic vision of what you’re capable of and where you want your actions to be heading, why would you even bother to plant the seeds? You fill your days with beauty because you believe you are deserving of beauty and that days filled with beauty are possible for you.
Accessing Inner Wisdom
It’s almost as if the gardener mindset is being invited in by a masterful conductor who knows what is needed for what that person declares matters to them. This belief and inner wisdom we have for our vision of a life well lived can be accessed in many ways. I like to access my believer of big and bold things through looking at a childhood photo of myself (in the smiley, totally unselfconscious era) or even to observe it in the kids running into the primary school local to me at drop-off time. They’ve got bed head and cute scooters, but they also have that beautiful innocent energy running through the gates ready to learn because life is there to be grabbed by the horns.
Transformation Tool: Exploring Your Younger Self
Exploring your younger self is all about getting in touch with the part of you who used to dream and look at the world as a place of opportunity.
Grab an old photo of yourself from the carefree days.
What do you love about your child self?
When you bring in the energy of your child self to where you are now, what do you want for yourself?
What wisdom does that child version of yourself have for you? What do they want you to stop doing and start doing?
These two tools are important because they are ways of accessing what we need from an empowered state of being. Rather than panicking because you don’t have the tools, you get to ask yourself what tools you need. If you need to call in support from someone, you get to do that through a measured response, not a knee-jerk reaction. What I love about building up your tools is that they offer a safe haven to come back to when you lose your footing. You get to come back to assess your tools, call in qualities which you may not have been honouring, and bring in the wisdom of your creative self.
And once you have your tools you get to strategise:
When I have these tools on my side, I am ready to…
SAY YES to…
SAY NO to…
A first step I want to take is….
What will it be?
Keep on being bold & don’t forget to take beautiful care of yourself.
Love & light,
Blaise x