The Three Hour Business Gardening Challenge

Floppy-eared, pale-grey, and whole line of them growing… in the carpet of my office.

I’m back after three weeks away, and we’ve had two harvests, one expected, one not. The expected harvest was the big pile of green beans, yellow crook-neck squash, and blackberries that came ripe while we were gone.

The unexpected harvest were those mushrooms, fed by a little too much water from our garden watering system seeping down, evidently, into my normally extremely dry and clean basement office.

The lesson? Given the right conditions, things grow. They just grow.

Give your veggies the right conditions, sunlight, water, good soil, and they grow. Give mushrooms and mold darkness, water, and a wool carpet, and they grow.

It was very frustrating, even frightening (no one has to warn us about the health dangers of mold) to find the mushrooms growing. And it lit my heart up to see our garden bursting forth. Similar conditions, with some significant differences.

We moved the hoses that were pouring forth into my office, and have been applying light, heat and other things to the mold. And we’ve been eating up the string beans and squash. The berries just seem to… disappear. 🙂

In Sufism, one quality of the Divine is called Al Hayy, the Alive. An essential quality of the Divine presence is aliveness. It means that things have a tendency to grow. (They also have a tendency to die, but that’s part of growth.)

So let’s make a distinction between the mechanics of developing a business, and the organics of how a business grows.

The Organics

At the back of our yard towers a tangled wall of laurel and blackberry. It’s great for privacy and, in August, fruit. It also blocks the sun.

We had to study the yard to see where the sun hit the longest. Originally I planted a cucumber plant where the laurel blocked the sun until after noon. Oops. I moved it into a more sun-drenched area, and it’s recovered somewhat.

The organics are simple. Plants need basically three things: water, sun, and nutrients.

Your business organics are fairly simple as well. You need people, expertise/information, and money.

People are in three categories: customers, colleagues and support. Expertise/information: You need to be offering something, a product or a service, that is based in something real. And it helps tremendously to continue to increase your knowledge and experience in your area of expertise.

Money: The amount of money you need can vary wildly, but you do need some.

The Mechanics

A garden requires some mechanics. You dig the garden beds. You add compost. You lay hoses. Maybe you go as far as I do and dig a trench to bury the hose as it crosses the playing/mowing part of the yard.

You buy a timer and hook it up to the hoses. You put cages around the tomatoes. You weed.

Notice that none of that actually grows the plant. It’s all about getting sun, water, and nutrients to the plants, so they can do their own thing.

Focus on the Three Organics

The mechanics of a business, and a garden, can feel overwhelming and confusing. There can be a lot of details that go into laying the hose correctly. It’s tempting to bring your focus entirely onto the mechanics.

Don’t. Remember that plants and businesses grow in the right conditions. Your job is just to help provide the right conditions.

The Mechanics of Accessing People, Expertise, and Money

Don’t misread that. The actual relationships with people are organic, heart-centered, beautiful. But the way you come into proximity with them, whether you write an article and publish it, or get in your car and drive to a meeting, have mechanical elements to it.

Your marketing, networking and meeting structures, commitments, and schedules are the mechanics of how your business accesses people.

Your sales and accounting structures, tools, and reports are the mechanics of how your business accesses money. Online banking, shopping carts, sales processes and systems are all part of this.

Your continuing education, including your commitment and schedule around reading, workshops you attend, practice, and blank time to dream/think/create are how you bathe your business in expertise and information.

Sure, you can get complicated about each of these, but you don’t have to.

Keep Them In Balance, People

Too much water, not enough sun and nutrients (plus no plant), voilá: mushrooms! Too much sun, not enough water and nutrients: baked earth. Lots of nutrients, but not enough sun or water…

You get the picture.

What conditions surround your business? Are they supporting the growth of mushrooms or string beans?

The Three Hour Business Gardening Challenge

Here’s the challenge: take one hour with each of the three organics: people, money, expertise. Use Remembrance, prayer, contemplation, meditation, plus your good ol’ noggin. I recommend using the Divine Quality Al Hayy in your meditations and prayers, remembering that the One is the source of all life and growth.

And think about the structures, commitments and schedule with each of them. Use your heart to identify three steps forward you can take with each of the organics. Make them small steps, things you can implement in the next 2-3 weeks.

Even if you haven’t taken the full three hours, any quick heart-insights about your organics and your mechanics? Come share them on the blog. [link to blog post – delete this sentence on the blog post]

p.s. Last chance to jump into Sacred Selling

The course starts tomorrow. I’m very jazzed to start teaching it, especially after spending so much time immersed with my Sufi teachers. The concrete. The sacred. Paying clients. Intimate, vulnerable, critical relationships. Changing the world.

Selling is a required skill in making a difference. Please join us.

Details and Registration: Sacred Selling