Blooming Cherry Light Bulb Moment

Yes­ter­day I had a light bulb moment as I was run­ning among the cherry trees.

Run­ning is one of small vic­to­ries I have achieved dur­ing the past two years when my con­sul­tancy busi­ness started to be erratic and unpre­dictable. I would have weeks packed with cor­po­rate train­ing, speak­ing and coach­ing assign­ments, trav­els abroad, fol­lowed by weeks of sin­gle one-to one coach­ing ses­sions, with a few teach­ing classes and mainly non-paid con­fer­ences and vol­un­teer activities.

Ebb and flow

Fak­ing flow. Push­ing for more flow. Send­ing com­pul­sive sig­nals on the web. Bea­cons in the Twit­ter­verse night. On the ebb peri­ods, wait­ing for the flow to come back and inun­date my soul and my bank account, (insert a *grin* here) I would sit and stare at this screen, send mes­sages in the bot­tle and spend an awful amount of time surf­ing the web and col­lect­ing beau­ti­ful sea-shells. I would “scoop” them, tweet them, “like” them, google plus and share them on linkedIn, more and more sel­dom blog about them.

Why not on my blog? Because I felt I had first to “be the suc­cess I wanted to achieve” and shar­ing these long peri­ods of wait­ing for the next assign­ment was just mak­ing me feel even more mis­er­able. I wanted to keep the cheer­ful “go and get them, girl” kind of face.

I didn’t want any­one to feel “sorry” for me. I didn’t want any­one to know that I could strug­gle with get­ting clients, with my finan­cial auton­omy. I am sup­posed to be a cre­ative pos­i­tive suc­cess­ful exec­u­tive coach who walks her own talk with con­fi­dence and teach by exam­ple. Phrases like “fake it until you make it” are still very strongly engraved in myself. Or “suc­cess attracts suc­cess” and that kind of crappy law of attrac­tion babble.

So I stayed out of my blog for a cou­ple of weeks, which actu­ally became two months. I found myself good excuses for not exer­cis­ing (too cold, too windy, too rainy, my run­ning clothes look ugly, I have my peri­ods, I am not a sports per­son any­way, I have already taken a shower, I have to fin­ish this con­ver­sa­tion on twit­ter and then I’ll go…). You guess what? The ebb lasted a lit­tle longer than usual.

The Ebb

Fan­tas­tic rain­bow projects co-designed with a cou­ple of trusted part­ners (no signed agree­ments, though) since last novem­ber are still six feet under. I had pic­tured myself in spring, joy­fully loaded with clients and new assign­ments, frol­ick­ing between air­ports, mak­ing Tus­can plans for the sum­mer with fam­ily. I find myself at the ebb, on an empty shore, count­ing a few sea shells & weeds, still wait­ing for star fish. Explain­ing this painfully to my banker. Look­ing at real­ity in the face (face palm as my mis­chie­vous friend Sandy Maxey explained me on Twitter).

So, what does it have to do with cherry trees?

I took Steven Press­field’s advice about horse power and exer­cise and resumed run­ning. I also took my own advices actu­ally. You remem­ber the big triple cri­sis I had last sum­mer? It led me to write Silly things that help dur­ing cri­sis. Well, I should have known bet­ter and sticked to these as a daily rou­tine. They saved my san­ity once, they should be used as pre­ven­tive med­i­cine, not only dur­ing the crisis.

When I say I go for a run, I actu­ally fol­low the exact rou­tine I have achieved thanks to an iPhone app called “Couch to 5K” (no spon­sor!) and great music too! I may bridge into 10 k, but not ready yet…So, I  do the exact same run every time and I’m start­ing to spot each tree, each coun­try road, each rock by heart. I asso­ciate them with vivid smells, song tracks and the sound of my pulse in my heart, my throat and my ears and my feet on the earth. I have devel­oped a habit of snap­ping a few pic­tures on my way, almost at the same places.

One par­tic­u­lar tree always pulls me in. I have to stop and stare. Con­tem­plate and med­i­tate. Maybe it’s because the slope is going up, it’s almost the end and sweat starts to drip­ple between my shoul­der plates. It’s the cherry tree you see at the begin­ning of this post. That was a cou­ple of weeks ago, in full bloom, radi­ant and proud. Like me, com­ing back from a week’s lead­er­ship train­ing for l’Oréal mar­ket­ing direc­tors and prepar­ing for my first TEDx talk in Stuttgart.

Then, there’s this other shot. Where the flow­ers are with­er­ing, the col­ors are fad­ing, turn­ing brown­ish, hang­ing their lost heads down.

Nat­ural and so “cliché” vision of the sea­sons. What struck me, how­ever, was the co-existence simul­ta­ne­ously of dead flow­ers and very lively fruits. It had never occured to me this way before.

Doubts and fears

I stopped and reflected. A major assign­ment I had counted on had been post­poned. Peo­ple who had asked me to do “tons” of busi­ness with them were becom­ing silent. I thought I hadn’t per­form as well as I would have liked dur­ing my TED talk. I listed the pay­ments I was late into and wor­ried about mak­ing ends meet. I won­dered if I’d bet­ter not get a “real” job and stop liv­ing in the Teddy bear’s house (bisounours).

Focus on Bright Spots

I gazed a few min­utes, stand­ing in front of the cherry tree, get­ting closer and closer, tak­ing big breaths of earthy smells. I looked closer and I saw very clearly an olive like fruit, solidly and con­fi­dently grow­ing among the with­er­ing petals. I regained trust and started to look at the future more cheer­fully. This too will pass.

When I came back home, I cleaned and vac­u­umed and tidied. I woke up my three hiber­nat­ing teenagers in Easter hol­i­days, still sleep­ing at noon. I didn’t take per­son­ally their grumpi­ness and snorts. I went into the gar­den and cut arm­fuls of Lilac. I pre­pared sim­ple spaggetti with olive oil and gar­lic and plenty of parmigiano.

After the lunch, I asked the twins to help me plant some pota­toes. We’re start­ing a veg­etable gar­den. Until now the earth had been too dry and tough to dig. They asked me for instruc­tions. They saw my blank face. I said I had never done it but it should not be too com­pli­cated. We started to laugh hys­ter­i­cally together. We got dirty and exhausted from the hard phys­i­cal work. Much harder than in the movies, when they are shov­el­ing tombs for cow­boys. We dis­cov­ered we had fun dig­ging and being out­side together, instead of each of us sep­a­rated in front of a screen…

When I even­tu­ally came back to my home office and sat down at my desk, I found this lovely post in my email box. “The Ebb of Absent”. I was not alone to feel that. It was ok, not the end of the world. I felt “val­i­dated”. I com­mented and almost imme­di­ately started writ­ing again. Trans­lat­ing into Eng­lish from French some­one else’s thought, then find­ing my own voice again. I wrote “A Woman for whom Lead­er­ship has no Gen­der and is an Art”.

The next day, I spent two hours weed­ing the gar­den. When I came back inside, it was eas­ier for me to con­vince the kids to get to do their home­work. Incred­i­bly easy actu­ally. I sat at my own desk and, believe me or not, I had a con­fir­ma­tion for one of the Inter­cul­tural train­ing assign­ments I was count­ing on, since novem­ber. Actu­ally, I had just given up on “hop­ing” and decided to close that drawer for good. A small step, just a one day train­ing, but I took it as a lucky omen. An olive-sized green cherry.

Some times, all what it takes is star­ing at a cherry tree and weed­ing your gar­den. click to tweet

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