The Garden We Were Given

At some point, every leader I know gets found by the same question. It arrives in the pauses, when the doing stops long enough to feel the weight of the years. What have I actually done with the time I’ve been given?

Antonio Machado’s poem ends there. The wind asks the poet’s soul what it has done with its jasmine. The flowers are dead. The petals withered. The poet weeps.

I watched a brilliant CEO walk out of a standing ovation from her board, sit down in the hallway outside the room, and stare at her hands. When I asked what she was thinking, she said, “I have no idea if any of that is actually me.”

That’s the question beneath the question. And it’s the one most leaders never make time for.

The measures we used to organize our sense of self start to feel unreliable, less weighty. Title. Track record. Accomplishments on a bio. A clear sense of who we are as leaders gets slippery when the story we’ve been hearing and telling turns fuzzy at the edges.

William Stafford called it the thread. “There’s a thread you follow,” he wrote. “It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change.” The thread isn’t your personal brand. It isn’t your CV or resume. It’s the essential thing underneath all of it, the part that remains when the title is gone, when the market shifts, when the team you built moves on, even when you sell it all and walk away.

Most of us spent the first half of our careers accumulating. Credentials. Wins. Organizational altitude. Accumulation is real work. But it is not the same as becoming.

The leaders who do the most durable work are the ones willing to ask hard, truth-finding questions about their own story. What has this decade built in me? Am I practicing to become the person I aspire to be? What promises have I broken to myself, and is it time to remedy them? Whose expectations am I still carrying that were never mine to begin with?

These aren’t questions with clean or easy answers. That’s the point. You can never tell the full truth about yourself. But you can try by excavation. And in the trying is the ongoing work of becoming a leader worth following, because you’re first and always becoming a person who knows who they are.

The garden Machado mourns is not a metaphor for failure. It’s a metaphor for neglect. For the years spent looking everywhere but inward.

Tend the other garden. The one only you can see. The one that you’ve been looking for, but neglected for another.

If you want a more trusting team, a culture of belonging or a magnetic brand that attracts more of the right customers, I can help. If you'd like to explore if working together makes sense, drop me a line.

Let’s Talk >