What Are You Sowing?
Jun 15, 2020
“Your thinking, more than anything else, shapes the way you live. It’s really true that if you change your thinking, you can change your life.”
--John Maxwell
It seems like I spend many a Saturday pulling weeds, deadheading flowers or moving the decorative rocks around my plants to find the irrigation that the previous owners installed. I really don't mind doing this because gardening, including weed pulling, is like Valium to me. It's calming, gives me time to think and the dog loves being out there, too.
Most of my ornamental pots are absolutely thriving, while others just don't look so good. We moved some rocks, found irrigation, but it didn't seem like it was working well. While out there, I began to think how much the my garden reminded me of my mind. No, not that I have rocks in my head, which feels true sometimes, but what I sow in my mind is often what I reap in real life.
"How the mind is fed, shapes the life that's led," Christian Simpson (my coaching mentor.)
Like any garden, the mind can be gorgeously cultivated or shamefully neglected. What we plant, grows. Just as I intentionally cultivate my flower pots and garden to keep them free from weeds, allowing the ornamentals to flower and flourish, I need to tend the garden of my mind.
If I don't plant seeds of truth, growth, and possibility, an abundance of weed-like seeds of lack, limitation and mediocrity will take hold and continue to produce after their kind.
I can allow my current circumstances to permeate my mind garden and believe that "that's just the way I am" or "that's just the way it's going to be," or I can plant seeds of expectation of good things to come. I can sow seeds that will ultimately change my life.
I need to remember that my current circumstances do not define me. My current circumstances are the product of what I have been planting in these last years. The very cool part of all this is that I can weed my mind. I am lord over my thoughts and I can change them. And when I change what seeds go in, I change what I become without. Yippee!
Above is one of the thriving pots. It's been weeded, nourished and it is so beautiful, but it takes constant vigilance to maintain that beauty. So it is with our minds--it takes constant watchfulness and care.
What are you planting? What thoughts are you nourishing? How are you cultivating the rich, fertile soil of your best asset, your mind?
This is something for me to think about, as well, as I head back out with my dog, Truffle, to see if more Miracle-Gro will help the other pots.
Thinking great thoughts,
Jan
Jan McDonald
The John Maxwell Team
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