Taking Care of Your Favorite Plants

I'm finishing up my three-part gardening series today with a post about taking care of your favorite plants. We've covered seeds, germinating, and being careful in what you plant. Now let's talk about their care and feeding.

By favorite plants, I mean the ones that provide you with fruit or enjoyment or fulfillment or nourishment in some way. In regards to your private practice, the most important one is of course YOU! You need to take good care of this most important asset, with rest, relaxation, rejuvenation, education, and just plain fun!

But let's get back to my original intention of this post - the external plants whose fruit feeds your private practice.

For me, these mainly include my website, web marketing, and referral sources. I've found I need to water, fertilize and sometimes trim these to keep them producing good and plentiful fruit.

In real life, those actions include keeping my website fresh and up-to-date, continuing to find new places on the web to post about my site and practice, and sending regular thank you notes out to people who refer to me.

And a last thought is that you need to harvest the fruit too, to keep it producing more. I have had referrals from time to time (for both my Google biz and counseling biz) that I was too busy to respond to in a timely manner. The fruit rotted, and I assume that referral source probably soured a bit on me. Thus my garden is only as big as I can work it. Interesting stuff.

All the best, Your Grateful Guy

Are You Planting Weeds or Flowers?

Keeping with the spring/garden theme, my question for today is "are you planting weeds or flowers?"

On a psychological or spiritual level, our thoughts, word and actions are continually influencing our lives, not only for this moment, but in continuing ripples that reverberate over time. As I wrote in my last post, sometimes seeds take a long time to germinate, and then more time to bear fruit.

So, what are you planting? Weeds or flowers?

For me, weed seeds would be ideas, words and actions that reflect judgment, scarcity, criticism, doubt, struggle and other negativity, such as:

• Speaking ill of other therapists
  
• Constant complaining about how bad things are
  
• Keeping clients that you aren't a good fit for (because you want the $)
  
• Trying to cheat someone financially, or be cheap with them (not pay their fee, etc)
  
• Being critical of others efforts at growth or expansion
  

For me, flower seeds would be ideas, words and actions that show gratitude, creativity, abundance, flow, compassion and faith. That would include doing things such as:

• Referring out to other therapists when it's right to
  
• Speaking confidently and open-heartedly about your work
  
• Open-heartedly helping others around you
  
• Brain-storming new business ideas
  
• Doing Self-care
  
• Giving back financially to where you are spiritually fed
  

Remember, if you plant weeds, you're going to need to pull them at some point! And one characteristic of real-life weeds is that if you let them grow and turn to seed, they turn out a prodigious amount of new seed!

Best, Your Grateful Guy

Seeds - Planting and Germinating

I've been out in the garden today, and combined with this week's new therapy client, a post has developed.

The new client I met with yesterday was such a sad young man, and my heart was open to him and felt his hurt with him. In speaking with him, he worked with a man I knew the first couple of years I was in Seattle (like 1999-2002). I hadn't seen the acquaintance in 5-6 years, but here was someone coming in because I knew him back then. In my seed analogy, a seed planted and forgotten years ago germinated and came to life.

Seeds are interesting things. Some germinate easily, under a variety of conditions. Some can sit dormant for years. Some need external help (such as to go through a bird's digestive track, or in the case of giant sequoias need fire to open the seedcase). A seed planted this month may need the heat of August to begin to turn into a plant. Many seeds never germinate.

What's the point in your private practice? Keep planting seeds, keep planting seeds, keep planting seeds. I could also say "keep the faith, keep the faith, keep the faith," because you will not see the fruits of much of your efforts for a long time, but don't mistake the lack of results today for what will be. Over time, if you keep planting seeds, you will have results come to you.

In short: be a Johnny Appleseed of your Good.

Best, Your Grateful Guy