🪴 Your Life Garden 101

Hey there! Welcome back to The Flow by Flocus. If you’re new around here, welcome! 👋  You can catch up on our previous editions right here.

This week: We’ve got a fresh new way for you to think about your life — why you should visualize it as a “garden”, plus some gardening wisdom and tricks for leveling up. Let’s dig in!

🌱 First, What’s Your Life Garden?

We’ve got a fun little exercise for you to try today:

Envision your life as a garden.

Picture all the big stuff — your goals, dreams, and relationships — as “plants”. Get as creative as you want!

Hopefully, most of your plants are healthy, vibrant, and flourishing. But you may also find some plants that are toxic, malnourished, or invasive.

As you develop your mental image of your garden, ask yourself:

• 🌡️ Which plants are most important to my garden, and how healthy are they?

• 🦟 Are any “pests” or “weather conditions” holding back my growth?

• 🌼 Which plants are currently missing from my garden that I’d like to grow this season?

The more you learn about your life garden, the easier it will be to look after, and the healthier your “plants” will be.

Read on to learn a handy gardening trick that you can apply to your own life, from your productivity to your relationships.

👩‍🌾 The Secret to a Thriving Life Garden

Real gardens come in all shapes, sizes, and variations.

A popular layout is the Three Sisters Garden, a planting technique that comes from indigenous North Americans.

The “three sisters” refer to corn, beans, and squash. These 3 crops are healthier and produce more when planted together in a small bed instead of by themselves. Here’s why:

• 🌽 Corn grows tall, giving the beans a natural trellis to grow on.

• 🫛 Beans provide nitrogen to the corn.

• 🌿 Squash grows low, its leaves protecting the roots from pests.

All these plants harvest at different times. They grow at different rates. They have different needs. But they work together well, because they support each other.

Applying the Three Sisters approach to your own “life garden” can strengthen your own support system and conserve mental “space”.

How else can you use the Three Sisters technique to cultivate a life that flourishes and fulfills? Read on to find out!

⛲️ 3 Ways to Upgrade Your Life Garden

Let’s explore some ways you can apply the Three Sisters Garden metaphor to your own “life garden”.

👯‍♀️ Figure out what goes better together

Just like corn, squash, and beans work better together, there are parts of your life that work better together, too.

So pair up similar activities (or people). Think not just in terms of efficiency and results, but also in terms of balance.

Here’s what that might look like:

• Doing a yoga flow after finishing an intense study sesh

• Introducing two of your friends who speak the same foreign language

• Listening to a podcast while working on a sewing project

🚶‍♂️ Seek out experiences outside your niche

Corn, beans, and squash are all from different families. They taste different. They look different. And those differences are part of what make them such a strong unit.

Similarly, engaging with people and activities outside of your norm can expose you to new experiences, perspectives, and ideas that you might’ve missed out on.

For example, if you’re a full-stack developer, try networking with knitters (or other kinds of handicraft artists). This community has unexpected, valuable lessons and insights to share that can level up your own work.

☀️ Identify your “seasons”

Like plants, humans have “seasons” when they’re more productive than others.

Some seasons are for planting seeds. Some are for fertilizing and nurturing growth. And others are for reaping your harvest (aka the rewards of all your hard work).

Get in touch with your seasons, keeping in mind that they may change with time. Find folks on the opposite “hemisphere” who can bring summer warmth to your winter blues.

🪅 Flocus Picks

A curated list of things worth sharing.

• 🧬 Find Your Founder Flow (Quiz) — How do your entrepreneurial strengths compare to 190,000+ founders worldwide? Take this free founder DNA quiz to figure out your founder unique style, maximize your strengths, and learn how to work around your weaknesses. Whether you’re starting a business now, or thinking of starting one in the future! Take the assessment here →

• 📘 The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times (Book) — We first learned about the Three Sisters vegetable patch from Michelle Obama’s book, which is a timely read for the season we’re in. Highly recommend!

• 🎶 Jazz Vibes (Spotify Playlist) — Chill instrumentals to wind down, reset, and recharge before a new week.

Companies like Founder Institute support our tiny team at The Flow, allowing us to continue delivering value to your inbox 💜

✨ Flocus: Your Personal Productivity Dashboard

Flocus helps you build a workspace you actually want to be in — whether you’re tackling big goals or just staying on top of the everyday. Create your peaceful productivity scene with relaxing playlists, ambient soundscapes, aesthetic themes, and more!

Visualizing your life as a garden isn’t just useful for productivity — it’s also a fun way to flex your creative muscles.

What did you think of this newsletter? We try our best to keep things unique and fresh. Let us know with a quick reply!

Until next Sunday,

Flocus Team