I didn’t plant anything.
I stood in my garden this morning, staring at the bare patch where I’d just harvested the garlic, and for the first time in years, I hesitated. A second crop of beans? Cucumbers? Some late annuals for the bees? I had a dozen good options and I froze — not from indecision, but from a strange, sudden clarity.
Dirt and I have been friends since before I can remember.
Outside was (and is) my happy place and growing-up, that meant being covered in dirt. Mom was a gardener and plants have had a place in my life everywhere I’ve lived.
I will also admit to having a worm collection that I kept in my bottom drawer when I was six or seven. It was discovered, and taken from me, by a mildly disgusted mom who finally searched my room for the rotten smell that had permeated for weeks. I didn’t know that I had to feed them so they were decomposing in the box. Oops.
Back to plants 🌱 and the lesson they taught me today…
Whatever I plant takes root. It feeds on what I give it, grows into something with its own momentum, and eventually bears fruit … “that I’d have to live with.”
That part came unbidden and was not about my garden.
It was the crystal clear insight I had about ideas that get planted in our minds. Like seeds, ideas are planted, fed and watered and then take on lives of their own, all without us even noticing.
Few people are aware enough to recognize it happening in real time. In that moment, standing in the dirt, holding a handful of seeds, it was so obvious.
Here’s the part that really stood out – nobody tells us, as high achievers, that we can hit every goal, build a career, win the awards, check every box — and still be gardening in a plot we never chose.
I know, because I almost did it.
Bad At Math
When I was a kid, someone told me I was bad at math. That was the seed. Nobody watered it maliciously — a comment here, a grade there — and by high school it had grown into my identity. I worked twice as hard just to keep up, didn’t make it into AP math, and quietly filed myself under “not a math person.” Case closed.
Then in college I got lost. My pre-med plan fell apart, my real passion — art — was buried under enough pain that I’d stopped counting it as mine, and the only other glimmer of interest that I had was numbers – an old, forgotten part of me that got tucked behind a door built out of what others had told me. I decided that I didn’t care if I was bad at math and jumped in anyway.
It turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, not because it opened the door to math, because it opened the door to possibility. The real power of that semester was seeing how easily someone else’s words had become my identity – and that I could change it.
I was the one who’d been watering that seedling all along. Which meant I could stop.
Pulling out a belief you didn’t plant doesn’t happen in an instant. For me came in three stages —
Three Stages
1. Awareness. You can’t weed what you can’t see.
Once a belief calcifies into identity, it defends itself: “That’s just who I am.”
You have to see past the identity that’s been created. In some ways, I was forced into making a shift. Looking at is as something that was said to a stranger can help.
The moment you can say “that’s just something someone told me, it’s not who I am,” you’ve made space for an alternative. Nothing changes before that distinction.
2. Willingness. Pulling out the plant.
Awareness alone doesn’t uproot anything.
Yes, I only stopped to look around because I ran out of other options — pre-med was dead, art was buried, and math was the last door that held any interest. Then I made very deliberate decisions.
I saw that I was forcing my life into the shape someone else had drawn and instead took a step toward something I’d actually loved – before I was told not to.
3. Vision. Planting and tending to a new seed.
Your brain is built to hunt for evidence that confirms what you believe, and it’s relentless at the job. Whatever belief you give it, it goes to work finding all the proof that belief is true. This is your secret superpower. Give it a new belief and it will go to work for you.
The moment I let myself consider that numbers might love me back, my entire experience of them changed, which led to an whole different experience of myself.
It turns out I’m actually very good with numbers, just not the way they were packaged and taught as math in grade school.
Intentionality
I didn’t end up a math major because reclaiming that identity did something bigger: it made me suspicious of every other verdict I’d accepted without question.
My experience with math gave me what I needed to address the larger elephant in the room – art. I’d been told in high school to “do the world of art a favor and get out of it,” which I did. I ran as far from it as I could.
After a semester of exploring math, and finding joy instead of derision, I took a baby step. I audited one art class. Sat in the back. Said nothing.
The amazing professor noticed anyway — she noticed my work, actually — and she said something that flipped my world up-side-down: she asked where I’d been hiding. She became a mentor and I graduated with a double major in art and sociology.
My future was now built on the willingness to test beliefs to see if they hold, instead of living out a story from my childhood.
“A teaching takes root and begins to live within you, unfolding its meaning over time like the petals of a rose.”
— Sufi teaching
If you’ve built a life that looks successful from the outside, yet feels out of alignment, here are some questions for you:
🌱 What belief took root inside of you that you are still watering that doesn’t actually fit you?
🌱 And if you weeded it out, what might you plant in its place?
Send us an email 📧 and let us know. These are the conversations that will change the world and we’d love to hear from you.
If living someone else’s version of your life feels familiar, you might like these two episodes:
Listen to The Soulful Leader Podcast on all podcast platforms including YouTube
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