Imagine you are walking down a street in your local neighborhood. Suddenly, your eye catches a breathtakingly beautiful rose garden on your right. It is vibrant, bursting with a variety of bright colors, and emits a heavenly scent. You notice how beautifully manicured it is, with bright, colorful roses lining the garden and yellow sunflowers poking their heads out in the back.
But then, suddenly, your attention gets drawn to the garden directly next to this. It is an awful sight, completely overgrown and wild. The garden is dull and full of weeds with many ‘unwanted plants’ that have grown. It looks sad and miserable.
Life is very much like a garden. Each garden looks very different and every garden holds within it unlimited potential. What have you been sowing in your garden? What are the results you have reaped?
Perhaps you have been trying your best to create your ‘dream’ garden but you are just not seeing the results you want. Is there too much sun, too much water or too much shade? Getting a successful garden to grow, is not easy and you may be doing a few things that are holding you back from having success.
1. The law of weeds
What are you planting exactly? If you don’t plant flowers, weeds will grow for sure. In other words, if your thoughts and actions are not geared towards success, they will bring you results you don’t want.
Identify the weeds in your garden and spots the wild shrubs that are strangling the roses from growing. Every bad habit, limiting thought or action, does not only hold you back from success, but reinforces what you are not happy with, making it harder to change each time.
2. A half-grown garden
What will your garden look like if you only spend a few hours a week gardening? Some roses might grow here and there, but it will most likely be teetering between success or failure. Most people want to have more success in life but they don’t want to actually work for it. You can see it every day, people put comfort before results and that is definitely going to hold you back.
You also have to do some things you don’t like and no half jobs. You are going to have to prep the soil, get your hands dirty, etc. Put results before comfort, success is not about staying in your comfort zone.
3. Always digging up your seeds
You need to be patient to see the results you want and to be successful. When you plant a flower, you believe and trust that it will grow. You don’t dig it up every day to see how much it has grown. Sometimes we don’t give ourselves enough time to produce the results we really want or we half halfheartedly try something and we give up too easily. We live in a world where instant gratification is possible and we assume this means every area of life. Patience could be your missing link to success.
4. Every flower is different
Every flower is different, unique and special in its own way. Just like you. Most people struggle to have success in an area because they are too influenced by outsiders. Do you feel torn between doing what you want and what others say you ‘should’ or ‘need’ to do; you must look, act and talk a certain way to be successful. Ironically, it is when we don’t give ourselves permission to be ourselves completely that we actually fail.
You cannot separate who you are from the success you achieve and you need to give yourself permission to do it ‘your way’, you already know what is right for you. You need to remain impartial sometimes to other people’s words and actions and how much you allow them to influence your success.
Lastly, if you really feel that you have been spending hours gardening, and you have applied what you have learnt, but your garden is still not growing, how can you identify why your garden is struggling?
It isn’t easy to see your blind spots, so asking yourself similar questions to these could be your best next step
- If you viewed things from another person’s point of view, what new information would that perspective give you?
- How do you normally sabotage or hold yourself back – and what will you do differently this time?
- What might you have to give up in order to be more successful?
We tend to focus more often on what is going wrong, rather than what is going right and sometimes we forget our small successes. Remember that success is a journey, not a destination!
To your success!
