A bright and cheerful microclimate
I want to build on last week’s newsletter because I got responses to it that I suspect you might relate to.
Many people shared that they feel they’re in different phases of growth depending on the situation or the people around them.
Do you feel the same?
Maybe you’re a Fruit at home but a Shoot at work. Or some days you feel like a Flower, others you feel like a Seed.
I love what Lisa G said in the webinar where I first taught this:
“I feel like this is like change; you can have more than one journey through the stages in your lifetime.”
Huzzah!
There isn’t one right path to grow or to help others grow. But there is a way to make growth feel more natural, and keep it moving in an upward direction.
So let’s dig into that a bit (pun intended).
When I created the growth scale, it made me think of a special place in my hometown of Canberra, Australia: the Australian National Botanic Gardens.
The garden is organized into microclimates.
You’ve got the rainforest gully; the red center, which pays homage to the Australian desert; Banksia Garden (for my non-Aussie mates, these are a very cool and unique wildflower); and the Eucalypt Lawn (a forest tree native to Australia).
Each of these areas needs a different amount of sun, shade, water, and type of soil in order for it to thrive.
We, humans, are kind of like that, too.
In life, we also need different microclimates for the people in our lives, but also ourselves, so we can all thrive as our best selves.
Take, for example, my living situation …
I work from home, so I have created a microclimate for work, and a very different one in the living room for me and my wife to connect and be present with one another. (Our laundry room is our microclimate for books, but that’s a story for another day.)
You might think of microclimates as the places where you naturally Flower, and the places where you’re still learning how to sprout.
Within these microclimates, what do you need more of or less of to thrive in that space?
Does your home life require less of something so that you can Flower? Does your relationship with your kids (or grandkids or nieces and nephews) need more of something for you to offer Fruit?
It absolutely makes sense to move around the growth scale depending on context.
The work isn’t to force yourself into a different phase, but to adjust the microclimate so growth can happen and you can thrive as an ecosystem.
