If you follow me long enough, you will probably discover that I am a woman of juxtaposition. I love the peace and quiet of my country farm life with the chickens scratching in the yard, but I also love adrenaline and have been known to snowboard and SCUBA dive. These days the adrenaline usually plays out in my drive for forward momentum for building businesses, and helping my clients overcome their mental blocks (filling their tanks) to get them on the road to success. The peace and quiet is found in designing gardens filled with whimsy, beauty, and delight where I can recharge my batteries and in watching the farm animals do what farm animals do. I am working slowly toward my own personal goal of growing most of what I eat and doing so in a sustainable way that benefits the land and future generations.....And designing those farm systems, thinking through land management strategies for farms to decrease non-sustainable (and typically expensive inputs) while increasing profits for the small-scale farm producers, brings me full circle, right back to the forward momentum adrenaline side of personality. Today I want to spend a minute discussing why these two sides of my personality are really so interconnected.
This article from Mother Earth News reminded me of the driving force in my Holistic Management International course I took in summer of 2017. While farm life is notorious for taking up every spare moment of time, there are ways to proactively manage the farm business activities in order to budget vacations or date nights or holidays with family. By planning ahead and YOU managing the operations instead of THEM managing you, you CAN have a life AND be a farmer/rancher (or fill in whatever business you are in). Will that life be a little different than others' lives? Sure it will. But it doesn't mean you can NEVER do anything non-farm-related ever again (which is, by the way, what many people have told me to discourage me from following my dreams). While I'm specifically talking about farming here, doesn't this sound like anyone's life? If you manage your life, and work proactively, you get to stop being REACTive and rushing around without purpose.
Don't allow poor management to rule your life. And even more importantly, don't allow a simple management mistake to dictate whether you have success in the future. Mistakes happen, "unknowns" always occur, but it is VERY possible to mitigate and plan for unknowns to prevent disasters from occurring. IT'S JUST THAT MOST PEOPLE DON'T TAKE THE TIME TO DO IT.
In addition to my coaching practice, I'm studying to become a holistic management practitioner and educator to help farmers and ranchers change their management practices and become successful (coaching them on the business goals and management strategies side of their farm businesses as well as on sustainable practices). This fits like a glove with my personal and small-business coaching services. It's all about (1) dreaming where you want to be in business or in life, (2) creating a vision and mission to drive you there, (3) figuring out how you'll achieve that life (aka developing the strategies you'll employ), followed by (4) creating action items to get there, and (5) performing regular monitoring of your status to see if anything needs to be tweaked.
These concepts apply to farm businesses, non-farm businesses, and our personal lives. I can't begin to describe the satisfaction I feel daily - even in the midst of headaches such as my internet crashing...again - as a result of creating a vision and mission for my life, creating actionable goals and strategies to get me there, and, now this is the most important part, actually TAKING THE STEPS to get there.
No more procrastination on my life dreams. I'm doing this. I encourage you to join me.
Below is a compilation of some of my fulfilling life moments. Hope you enjoy and create your own fulfilling moments in 2019!
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