When I was little, I wanted to be a horticulturalist. It was partly for the love of saying the word, not being entirely sure what it meant. Over the years, though, I’ve come to realise where that desire came from – simply, the love of growing and nurturing. I have in mind a photograph of me as a one year old in my bouncy chair, plonked in the garden next to a geranium and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more excited face in my life. It was written!
This love of growing and nurturing has been about all sorts of things, including people, and planting seeds and watching them grow has long been a favourite habit of mine as a visual metaphor for all that.
The length of time it takes some seeds to germinate inspires patience in me. The abundance of life in spring after a long winter of quiet hibernation inspires faith that with the right conditions, ideas thrive in abundance. The way I look after different plants on my allotment helps me cultivate new projects with differing energies – as in this episode of The Plot about pruning.
It may be no surprise, then, that my approach to work is as a cultivator, and this green little corner of my working world at The Forge studio (above) is most definitely a happy place.
I am like loads of us, in that I am uncomfortable with notions of old fashioned networking in busy rooms full of strangers, hate the idea of sales, and the M-word leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth, all of it conjuring up a claustrophobic sense of being sold stuff I don’t want or need by people who don’t care what state they leave me in as long as I buy what they’re peddling.
Back to the garden, and breathe!
My desk-neighbour Sharon (a writer) and I both love green, growing things, and both really want our indie creative working lives to be a triumph so a few months ago we decided to help each other out with a weekly check in about what we’re doing to keep nourishing and nurturing our self-employed businesses to life in the way we dream about – like a vision of summer.
We call it ‘Greenhouse’.
In Greenhouse sessions we give each other a run down on what’s happened the last week, set out some thoughts about what next, then we help each other choose a few simple marketing actions to bring those things to life: a phonecall to a new person, a piece of writing we can share, a letter, a coffee date, a personal project, or perhaps just an idea to save for next month’s newsletter.
Our Greenhouse is really just working out how to have more of the conversations we love having, with clever experts who have been wondering how to find people like us to help them. I’ve met some absolutely lovely people in recent seasons, and really enjoy hearing about their ideas, discovering if there’s a way I can help them do the cultivating.
(BBC Gardner’s Question Time, maybe? I was on that show once – they chose my question as the final comedy one to wrap up that week’s broadcast. Old before my time.)
It took me a long time to find the right way to look after my work life like this, and it works because it’s kind, it’s easy, it’s important, it encourages me to connect with lovely people doing interesting things, and it’s a way of doing it that lines up with my values, and it works.