What if your business was a tree?
Are you towards the beginning of your business journey? Do you keep wondering if you’re ’doing it right?’
At the beginning stages of building our business, it’s super common to experience doubt.
“When will my business ‘take shape?’ It feels like there’s so much I need to learn, I can’t but help feel behind already! I see so many wonderful businesses and creatives, doing their thing, and I wonder if I’m missing some secret tool that would make this all easier—I feel like I get distracted in comparison.”
All that doubt can feel overwhelming and stop us in our tracks. Staying focused on your own path isn’t easy. It requires a lot of practice and intention.
However one of the best things you can do, in my opinion, is to find metaphors and analogies that help you see your business—and your relationship with it—in a different way.
If it feels like a struggle, what are ways you could take out ‘the struggle?’
How might you think of your business in a way that feels supportive and easeful, rather than burdensome and scary?
Here’s one way I encourage my clients to think about it 👇
"Arbres-couleurs-1 - trees in colour - from Larousse du XXème siècle 1932" by EN NOIR & BLANCY.
Your business is a tree.
One of the things I encourage my clients to do when they’re at the beginning of their creative business journey is to imagine that your business is like a tree.
At this stage, it’s not a fully formed, adult mature tree. It’s a sapling, or it might even be a seedling, just sprouting from the ground.
Your tree is not fully developed yet. So much growth needs to happen and will happen. And that growth is going to look nonlinear.
Don’t expect too much + you can’t always ‘see’ growth.
In the beginning, your creative business tree is young and small. A lot of ‘growth’ needs to happen. You need to pour energy and resources into it before you even see anything.
At certain stages you’ll see a lot of growth on the surface; you’ll see lots of shoots and greenery happening. And other times it won’t look like much is happening at all.
Your growth is not going to look like anyone else’s or the tree that’s right next to you. It might be a completely different species! And that’s okay.
What’s important is the focus and energy you’re putting into creating and growing. It’s understanding the nutrients, support and resources that you and your business (tree) need to grow.
Don’t neglect the roots.
It’s useful to remember that trees have roots. You don’t see them, yet they have the extremely important job of supporting the tree and supplying nutrients.
Roots are ‘hidden’ and underneath. Our support systems aren’t always obvious on the surface, but every business will have its own system of support. Think about what your creative business needs at this stage and how you can best support it—before you ask it to bear fruit.
Your ‘branches’ and offerings will grow unevenly. Some branches will grow strong, some will fall off or wither completely.
As a tree matures, its branches spread out. As your business grows, you’ll try new offerings, maybe new marketplaces, new networks, etc.
Not every offer works. Not every experiment works out the way you thought it would.
Similarly, as a tree grows, some branches will become stronger and bigger, while others might decay and die. Many trees shed their lowest branches as they grow. “Once the branch starts to experience significant decay, the limb is shed to help prevent the decay from spreading into the trunk.”
If you think of a business as having multiple offers or reaching out to extend its network, it doesn’t all happen at once. You need time to grow your branches.
As you and your business mature, you will notice that some branches may bear more fruit than others, while others don’t grow in the way you expect.
Your creative business (tree) goes through seasons.
You’ll also notice that your tree—and creative business—goes through seasons.
Whether you have a spring, summer, autumn, and winter, or if you go through dry and rainy seasons, the climate, circumstances, and your maturity will differ each season.
Some seasons, it will look like not much is happening at all. Some seasons, it will look like things are dying. And other times you’ll get huge growth and wonder where it came from!
But all the time your business is maturing and growing. Each stage is a life stage—it is part of the life and business cycle. Just because it looks different each day, doesn’t mean anything has necessarily gone awry.
One way this analogy diverges is that your tree is not going to go through the same season as every other tree around you. However, remember that when you’re looking online at other businesses and their owners, they aren’t right next to you. You’re not going through the same circumstances.
Your creative business tree will look different to someone else’s tree.
If it’s not super obvious by now, your tree—and business—will look different to what you see around you.
In the beginning, you don’t know what kind of tree your creative business is going to grow into. So if your tree bears lots of blossoms whilst another one doesn’t, or if the tree next to you bears fruit quickly and yours takes longer… remember this is a consequence of natural variation. Our nature, circumstances, who we are, and what we want, are all different. How wonderful :)
No tree is better than another. They’re just all different. Learn your nature. Work with it.
Finally… don’t blame nature.
Your tree’s growth can’t be hurried along unnaturally. However, its growth is influenced by circumstance, nurture, and environment.
Your tree (and creative business) doesn’t reach maturity overnight. It requires time, care, nutrition and support.
We never blame the tree for not growing fast enough. We see what we can do to influence growing conditions.
We never blame the tree for what it is. We work with what we have and we appreciate its unique nature.
Give yourself permission to keep going, and to keep growing your tree and business the way you want to. 💛
—Kathryn