What Seeds Are You Planting? Cultivating Patience in an Impatient World
© Martha Wooding-Young, The Resilient Executive, LLC. Fall-planted cauliflower at Heartwood
It’s amazing what $3.99 will get you. With inflation these days, shopping for food (and everything else) can be quite an eye-opener, so I’m ever grateful for the abundance of vegetables available just steps from our front porch in the veggie garden. The cauliflower above was planted in late August, 2023, and harvested yesterday, early May 2024. This was our first time planting winter hardy vegetables in the Fall and we were totally unprepared for the abundance: arugula and spinach that we ate from December until they bolted, last week, and broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower that started producing in February and are only just petering out now it is May. At $3.99 per pack of seeds, enough for two seasons, that’s a great return on investment!
So what seeds are you planting? Are you investing in emotional intelligence training for your team, to plant seeds of compassion, gratitude and other pro-social emotions that improve team cohesion and make people more likely to enjoy their work and therefore be better at it? Are you investing in curiosity to listen to your peers’ and your team’s ideas before deciding yours is the best and running off down the road to implementation when there might be a better option right under your nose? The results for these sorts of investments definitely take time, in all kinds of weather, just like vegetables.
To quote the Tao Te Ching, “Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?” In our always on, always in a hurry, never enough culture, growing vegetables is positively retro. But good things come to those who wait, as anyone familiar with the marshmallow study will know. So try it out: cultivate patience, grow compassion, nurture curiosity, build a better world, in any weather.
RESEARCH CITATIONS
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797619839045 marshmallow study revisited