I will never forget Rees’ face, my first client as a gardener, when she saw for the first time her greenhouse giving arugula leaves for lunch. She reached me months before when she was asking for help to revive her garden at home after spending a long time away, and it was my first successful gardening project in Guanajuato. After some time and another triumphant jobs, I got a message from a person asking for help from the tiny traveling girl with dreadlocks, since they heard about the marvelous veggies coming out from Rees’ greenhouse.
That’s me! I am the prosperous gardener! – I encouraged myself.
We agreed that I would come to this person’s house to check the place out and make my proposal of a project. That morning I left home feeling confident and ready to nail my appointment… The final result was completely different from what I expected.
I arrived to the meeting, and the existing garden was already beautiful to my eyes, but the owner was complaining about it since the beginning, and was trying to change it all. In our conversation some contradictory words came out in almost the same sentence: Cheap plants, Fast growing, Low maintenance, Beautiful Landscape, ASAP. So when I left the place I was feeling totally confused and after a very long time thinking, without a clear idea of a proposal for him.
Is that really me? What happened with the prosperous gardener? – I doubted about myself.
I asked for a second meeting with this potential client to try to clarify more my ideas, but instead of that I was even more confused when he used conflicting concepts like “Desert plants with Colourful tropical vines with flowers”. What could I do in order to help this person? In the end, I actually couldn’t make a proper project proposal, and for the first time in a long time I doubted about my gardening skills.
It took some time for me to understand that we were both failing in answering the main and first question we had to ask ourselves before trying to start this gardening project: What was my potential client purpose with changing his own garden? We never stopped to think about this, so we both lost our connection with ourselves. This anecdote was a big reminder of the importance of having a proper mindset for every activity in my daily life. So even I could not close any deal with this person, and there was no gardening project, I had a different happy ending by learning an unforgettable lesson.
Has this happened to you before? I highly recommend to follow this Guided meditation to awaken your inner green thumb. Try it before just jumping into a new project, without appreciating and deeply thinking on the goals you want to reach.