Spring is here: Let’s emerge and bloom!

Transport yourself down memory lane with me, and relive the moments when you’ve walked through a garden admiring the trees and flowers, or when you walked through a park gazing at the redwood trees, or went hiking surrounded by colorful wild flowers or smelled the fragrant flowers at a nursery or the scent of the fresh grass in your front yard…

What is it that truly occurs as you look? You appreciate the birth of the new buds, the growth, the resplendence of it all, and you focus on the positive that surrounds you. You take it all in and you speak with awe, love, gratitude and joy for all that you see and the incredible variety of the beauty that exists. You don’t point out the ugliness of a flower or a tree; rather you nearly want to shout about the gorgeousness.

I believe it is innate in us to admire and love beauty and to be fascinated by it– and we protect and nurture the beauty that we cherish.

Spring is a season to remind us that new life keeps emerging, new blooms appear and a great variety of growth keeps on showing up all around us with uncontested stupendousness. The plants and trees that we love emerge in due time, bloom in due time, and they all have their own natural cycles.

As I wrote last year, spring is an opportune time to take a pulse check: “Taking a pulse check is weeding out what gets in the way of our being fulfilled and realizing our full potential. It is an opportunity to refresh, repair, recover, revitalize and fertilize what should be nurtured. It is a time to assess whether we are where we envisioned we would be.

“Taking a pulse check is a natural process that allows us to be in touch with the truth and to take full ownership of changes that must be initiated.”

So, let me ask you: are you emerging as who you truly are and blooming with your own natural beauty in its totality in leading yourself, leading others in your organization and in the boardroom? Does your home, your organization, your team and/or your board look like you envisioned it to be, mirroring the garden or the park that you admire?

We must ask ourselves as frequently as we can if we are living according to our own unique blueprint and manifesting our own beautiful potential. We are no different than the glorious flowers and trees that we behold. We all are meant to greet each day with the gifts, talents and skills that are innate in each of us– to appreciate them, to nurture them so that we may also cherish who we are and be on purpose.

Importantly, we must commit to each other to not ever compare ourselves to others and to not compare our loved ones to others. We must avoid projecting a gloom on the potential bloom of a child– of a sister, of a mother, of a friend, of a brother, of a father… of any of us. We must be thoughtful to not stunt the exquisite potential that exists for anyone around us as we discover and manifest our own. Does a flower standing next to another resplendent flower worry or hide its blossom for fear of comparing poorly? Is the redwood tree, standing in its own perfection, concerned with the tree next to it?

We each have the ability and capacity to realize our own potential, emerging and blooming as much as we can, without deterring the emergence and blooming of others.

We also must respect our own timing for that emergence and blooming. While we can help facilitate the blooming of others, we must be conscious of not projecting nor forcing the growth of others. We must learn to be patient for ourselves and others to understand what our individual life cycles are.

As spring unfolds, and blooms show up all around us, let us take the time to reflect about how we are positively and constructively enabling our individual and collective emergence and blooming as human beings, humbly figuring out our individual purposes; tweaking and finessing our collaborative initiatives at home, within our leadership teams, within our boards and when we play with others. Let us commit to galvanizing each other. We all deserve to, and all are worthy of, emerging and blooming.

Take a pulse check, and day by day lift the gloom that you have inherited in perhaps not allowing yourself to bloom and/or in letting others pout about your success. Be determined to be your best self in full bloom. Be watchful of your actions and communication, not scowling at others and/or keeping them in your shadow. Remember to look at your garden and notice how you want each flower to be radiant and seen for what it is. We all can be seen with our fullness without having to dim another. Imagine the possibilities for each other and our collective if we simply allowed ourselves to be in full bloom.

There is an effortlessness that we experience when we are in alignment with ourselves, and blooming is inevitable. Our lives have stories as do our gardens and forests. We must take the time to learn about ourselves through our stories, align with our own bloom cycles and not let the stories deter our growth but teach us how to not be afraid to transform and to be authentic to who we are and were born to be.

We must let go of our insecurities to “be” and let others “be.” Let’s get in touch with our visionary sides to emerge and bloom to fuel the realization of our individual and collective potential.