I am horrible at growing plants but my brother, Mark has the magic hands for it. I watched him take a flower bed of fledgling roses, and turn the bed into an abundant array of dazzling, multicolored huge roses. That year, I picked and regularly displayed breathtaking floral arrangements in my living room.
How did he did he take an underperforming rose bushes and make them into winning ones?
He pruned them.
He got rid of dead leaves, branches and poorly growing buds to make room for healthy buds, leaves and branches to grow.
At one point in the process, the he pruned so much I thought nothing would come of the bush. Sick looking, short branches stood only a few inches above the soil.
However, how wrong I was! The pruning allowed the full potential of the bush to eventually display itself. So, it is for our lives.
Whether you're looking at your business, relationships, parenting and/or health issues, making pruning a regular activity is vital. What is taking up space in your life and needs pruning? At work, how can you better use your time? At a staff meeting perhaps staying on the agenda rather than citing personal stories might be more effective. Maybe you realize your career has run it's course, and it's time to prune and reinvent your next move.
Looking at parenting, you might realize excessive control worked when your child was younger, but as a teen it is not helping you reach the goal of creating a independent, value driven youngster. In regards to friendship,you might consider pruning a friendship that takes excessive energy rather than uplift you. Looking for regular opportunities to prune is the key to a more successful life. Here are a few tips to guide you:
1. Normalize Pruning.
While most people understand the need for pruning, most people emotionally equate it with loss.How do you feel about change? If you find emotional resistance interfering with pruning areas of your life, you will need to work through the process. But realize that loss actually makes room for advancement. For example, if an infant insisted on crawling, it would not risk learning to walk. When a phase in life is dead, cut the loss and make room for the new.
2. Actively Search for Areas that need Pruning
Look for areas in which you are hanging on, hoping things, a strategy, habit or a relationship will magically get better. Are you trying harder to make something work when you should accept its end? How do you feel about moving on? Where will you get the resources and support needed to facilitate needed change? Looking and planning for change means you are streamlining the process to achievement.
3. Pruning Forces you to Live your Values
As you begin prioritizing your goals by deciding which values will frame your life, then it serves as a an armature to help you decide what daily activities must stay or go. If, for example, you value ambition in your life, and you find yourself surrounded by "victimized" friends who feel they have little control in life, then that is an incongruent area of your life. What type of pruning will you need to do in order to align your values to your friendship goals?
To conclude, letting go is a normal part of the life cycle. The more regualry we do it, the more the better able we are to live our full potential.