life lessons from a houseplant: part 2

If you read my blogs, you may know that I love houseplants. In fact, my living room and bedroom resemble a jungle. A few years ago, I repotted a plant to a larger pot and was so pleased that it exploded, growing and thriving in ways that would not have been possible in the smaller pot. (Read https://www.thrivewell-being.com/blog/life-lessons-from-a-houseplant if you’d like.)
 
However, I just had a very different experience with a plant that also seems to provide a life lesson. I recently switched two plants, moving one to a bigger pot and the other to a smaller pot. As I expected, the plant in the now-larger pot has been growing and expanding. It looks so much happier.
 
What surprised me is the other plant. The plant I put in a smaller pot had not been doing very well. It was a plant I was even considering getting rid of. However, once I put this plant in a smaller pot, it began unfurling new leaves and expanding in a way I had never seen before. The smaller pot provided containment and limitations that have helped my plant thrive. What is the lesson here?
 
Sometimes we do need to take risks and move beyond our boundaries to grow and learn.  On the other hand, sometimes knowing our limits and boundaries gives us the structure we need to grow and move forward with a project.
 
Deadlines are one effective strategy to provide limitations and give us good motivation. A deadline could be a date when a project needs to be completed by. This allows you to break the project into small, reasonable and doable goals along the way to move you towards the ultimate deadline.
 
A deadline could be very short-term: a time limit.  I think of an example from my own life to illustrate this. When I was in high school, I was very involved with a community theater, and during a show, I had rehearsal every night 8-11pm.  Having to be done with my homework before rehearsal (deadline) helped me focus and finish it each afternoon. I wanted to be done before I had to leave for rehearsal. I always marveled that, after the show was over, it would take much longer to finish my homework. I think things may fill all the time you give them.
 
Another type of deadline could be applied to how you use a time strategy to get your work accomplished. One strategy that builds on this and has been useful to my clients is to work in short, focused, uninterrupted blocks of time (60-90 minutes). An example of this comes from work I was doing with a postdoc. She was having a lot of trouble being productive and getting her work done, so we tried this strategy. She would work on just one thing for brief focused blocks of time (this means no open email, phone is put away, etc..) a few times a day. When she started using this strategy and type of deadline, she found that she could concentrate and get everything done she needed.
 
Are you struggling with something that, if you put some structure in place, you would be more able to tackle it successfully? Consider how you can use a deadline to give you a limitation and boundary in a way that will help you move your work successfully forward.