The primary shoot of a plant is called a leader from which everything blossoms. Like plants we all have a leader waiting to bloom.
A Leadership Garden is your heart, mind, and spirit working in unison to make the difference you truly desire.
There are two conditions that affect the growth of your Leadership Garden:
- A survival condition promotes the growth of weeds, tenacious plants with deep taproots. These weeds diminish personal power and enable gossip, blame, and victimization.
- A thriving condition allows vigorous, flourishing, and expansive growth, rooted in a strong mesh-like network of understanding, nurturing, inventive, quality, and unstoppable expression of leadership.
At the heart of a thriving Leadership Garden are six-leader friendly gardening practices:
- Be nonjudgmental. Forcing your opinions or personal values on others is toxic to the growth of your Leadership Garden. Being nonjudgmental connects you to others with love and appreciation for who they are.
- Do not enable. Suspending judgment by separating the behavior from the person, allows loving thoughts and communication about acceptable and unacceptable behaviors, without being self-righteous and enabling.
- Use empathy. To practice empathy you need to be responsible for your own thoughts and feelings, suspend judgment, and give up “being right” for the moment. Empathy is a bridge from survival to thriving leadership and is the most powerful way to interact with others.
- Prune gossip. On the surface, gossip seems like a harmless form of entertainment, due to a lack of anything better to talk about. The true underbelly of gossip is that it diminishes your personal power and trust with others.
- Eliminate blame. Blame is a more severe for of gossip and a way to deflect personal responsibility away from you.
- Eradicate victimization. Victimization is a form of survival leadership that robs you of the opportunity to be in control of, and responsible for, how you experience life.
