What My Garden Taught Me About Strengths (That I Already Knew)

Most mornings, you'll find me in the garden before I've even fully decided to be awake. Still in my pajamas, slippers on, coffee in one hand, clippers in the other. I'm not out there to get exercise or check a box. I'm out there because somewhere in my flower beds, there's a stem that's ready, and someone in my day is about to receive a small, unexpected bouquet because of it.

This is my first real year growing cut flowers. Delphiniums, zinnias, poppies, daisies, snapdragons, and this year, a handful of new experiments I'm still getting to know (has anyone heard of “Love in a Puff”?). Some mornings, everything cooperates. Some mornings I'm out there squinting at a droopy stem, wondering what I did wrong. Most days, it's somewhere in between.

Here's what nobody tells you about gardening, especially if you're someone like me, who leads with Maximizer: it will test every instinct you have toward getting it right the first time.

Maximizer means I am wired to take something that's good and make it great. Give me a strategy, a workshop, a piece of writing, and I will polish it until it shines. That instinct serves me well in a lot of places. In the garden, it's almost useless. You cannot will a zinnia into blooming faster. You cannot perfect a delphinium into standing up straight without staking it, and even then, in some seasons, it leans anyway. The garden has no patience for my need to finish something completely before I move on to the next thing.

What I've had to learn instead is that the garden doesn't need to be perfected. It needs to be tended. Every single day, a little. Sometimes that looks like weeding. Sometimes it's fertilizer, or water, or finally cutting back something that's gone to seed so the plant can put its energy somewhere better. Sometimes tending just means walking out there and noticing. Noticing what's thriving, what's struggling, what's ready, what needs more time.

It turns out that's exactly what strengths development looks like too, and I somehow needed a garden to remind me of something I coach other people on all the time. 

We talk a lot in this work about identifying your strengths, and that part matters. But identifying isn't the finish line. Strengths are not a report you read once and file away. They're not a personality test you take and put on a shelf. They're something you tend. You notice where they're showing up well, and where they might need a little more water, a little more room, a little more honesty about what's not working. You don't get to perfect them once and call it done. You keep showing up.

And then there's the part of cut flower gardening that I didn't expect to teach me anything, but did: I don't grow these to keep them. I grow them to give them away. A bouquet sitting in a vase on my own counter is lovely, but it's not really the point. The point is showing up at someone's door, or handing something across a desk, or leaving a small arrangement on a porch, because I noticed they could use it.

I think that's true of strengths too. Knowing what you do best is good. Useful, even. But the real return on that knowledge isn't something to keep to yourself. It's what happens when you actually use what you're good at in service of someone else, your team, your family, a student trying to figure out what's next. Strengths that stay in the vase on your own counter aren't doing what they're meant to do.

So here's what I'm asking you, the same question I ask myself most mornings while I'm out there in my slippers deciding what's ready to cut: are you growing your strengths, or did you just identify them once and stop? And just as important: who are you sharing them with?

Because the garden doesn't care how good your strategy looks on paper. It only cares whether you showed up today. I think strengths work might be exactly the same.

Reach out to Sarah@AspenRootCollective.com to find engagement solutions rooted in what matters most to your organization.

In growth & gratitude — Sarah