Happy New Year, everyone! January’s theme is New Beginnings.

In the early weeks with a new client, they usually want to start by creating an environment in which they can grow. A garden can be a fitting analogy.

Pretty much all of my clients like to start off by cleaning up and organizing, sometimes it’s just their desk, sometimes it’s their office space, or sometimes it’s their entire house! This is a lot like pulling weeds and prepping the soil.

Many of my clients like to make new friends and associations who are aligned with their new endeavors. This is like planting marigolds and other flowers and herbs to invite beneficial insects into your garden to help keep pests at bay.

An analogy from one of my clients is that plants need not only need soil, water and sunlight, but they also need the correct nutrients in the soil for the plants to grow. You can’t really see those nutrients. For example, if your soil is low in phosphorus you can’t see that, but you can see that your plant isn’t thriving so you need to figure out what it’s missing. He says that’s a lot like the coaching process, discovering what’s stopping you from thriving that you can’t readily see.

Another analogy that I like is “turning your shit into fertilizer”, transforming bad things that happened to you into something good.  In my photo, that’s represented by the straw mulch which comes from my henhouse and is filled with chicken manure. In my own garden, I do that very thing of turning shit into fertilizer. And look at my garden grow!

And then there’s Boundaries. I like the analogy of Boundaries being like a garden gate and I’m cultivating the garden inside, and I’m choosing the things I allow inside. I have a small fence around my garden to keep my chickens out during the active growing season, but I allow them in during the wintertime so they can help me till the soil and eat weeds and bugs as they start to emerge in the early spring.

During January I will be posting about laying the groundwork for New Beginnings.

I have room for one more pro-bono client to help me test drive my new coaching program before I start charging money. Comment or DM me that you’re interested.

Additional: As this is a new blog, there's some really weird stuff going on as I'm editing this. Not all of my font looks correct, and my photo's resolution is a little bit suspect. I'm both puzzled and excited as I'm learning the ins and outs of this new blogging format.