Pruning Your Life (Before Life Prunes You)

“Clear space to grow what matters most.”  (Stefanie Gas)

Years ago I read an article in an English Country Living that had quite an effect on me.  It was an article about a Swedish woman, married to an English member of the aristocracy, who went through a marriage breakup and described the experience with these words;  “life pruned me”.  I was very struck by that phrase – possibly because I had gone through a similar thing and felt the harsh cuts and uninvited acts of being forcibly jostled out of a former life. “Being Pruned” was a great way to put it and so this month, as its pruning time in the garden and winter being a time of contemplation, I want to talk about pruning back our lives. This time doing it ourselves and taking the thoughtful and deliberate steps to cut back that which is no longer fruitful and building a strong framework of branches that will in time produce the fruit we are after.

Incidentally, and as a bit of a side note as I know I have a lot of readers who would be interested, Lena ended up with a country house full of traditional furniture.  Do you know what she did? She painted the whole thing.  I loved it because she used all my favourite colours, the blues, greens, greys and whites of the Scandinavian palette and she lightened up and transformed that place. She even painted out the old dressers and brown furniture.  Which turned the house into a gorgeous setting for photo shoots, used by none other than one of my other favourite heroines and style masters, Laura Ashley.   Took a bit of courage to do that but I guess if you have gone through a pruning time – anything is possible!

So lets take a look at our lives now. Who is overwhelmed by too many things, too much to do, too many projects begun but never finished, toxic people, feeling stretched too thin and never seeming to have enough oxygen to breathe into the sort of lives we really want.  That’s what an unpruned bush or tree is like and now is as good a time as any to put some thought into our changing that.  What do we want in our lives and what fruit are we looking for? This is an act of simplifying life.  Getting down to what is important to us in any branch of our life, cutting out what we no longer want, or what’s draining us, pruning back unnecessary stuff so our lives can spring forth into life, and we can start to see over time, the fruits of our labours rather than the round and round sameness of the lives many of us leave.

An unpruned shrub or fruit tree cannot give its best and can end up just dying away after limping along for a few years. What happens is that there can be to much growth and the branches can get tangled together forming a thicket where little light and oxygen can enter.  In some trees, fruit comes on new wood and some on last years wood.  If not pruned, then the branches get longer and longer and the fruit ends up way out on the end of the limbs. Either way the tree is not able to grow to its full potential. It needs some judicious sharp cuts that may seem brutal at first in the cold hard light of winter, but come spring, will burst forth into life and end up a beautiful useful tree.  Sounds good doesn’t it? The good news is that even old trees can be rejuvenated by  little judicious pruning.

Step 1. Decide what sort of fruit you want.  Clarify your vision for your own life – who and where to you want to be in a year’s time, who you want with you, what are your priorities. Get really clear on that so you know what you are pruning for. This will be your guide for knowing what to keep and what to lose– if it lines up with your life goals – then keep it. If it doesn’t cut it off.

Step 2.  The initial aim with pruning is to establish a strong framework.   Now you know where you want to end up, use this to guide you into what branches you want to keep.  So have a branch that represents the physical area of your life,, a business/work one, a people or relationship one, a personal growth one, a spiritual one – you decide what is important to you and create a framework from that.

Step 3. Cut out anything that does not align with your goal or is preventing you from being effective.  Check in the financial area – do you have a leaky bank account?  Is there money going out of your account that shouldn’t be?  Are you distracted by shiny new offers – signing on for too many things,  committees, etc at the expense of what’s important to you? Its good for us to support our communities but its not always the right season – join up later when you have more time but do a bit of deleting now.  Incidentally, when pruning back branches that you no longer want when you are pruning, you have to cut right back to the wood so they do not resprout.

Step 4.  On each of those branches or areas of your life, think about what you really want . The ones you want to keep, prune back to what is effective and what you can manage.  This is for those of you who maybe like me are growing an online business using social media and constantly signing up for the next new course by some bright young thing who has appeared in my feed. My inbox definitely needs pruning with upwards of 20K emails in it.  Trouble is, it’s a form of distraction for me and as part of my own pruning process, I want to cut right back to the essentials of what I need to do to get traction.

 This applies to the people in your life. You significant other and your family should be top of your list for example. And that is relative to what stage you are in life. A young family has different needs to a grown up one so adjust accordingly.  Unfortunately we can often get too busy and neglect those vital relationships.   Apply this principle to each branch you have chosen and deliberately plan what you want to grow – getting rid of what is holding you back.

Step 5.  Part of pruning is also grafting.  What can you graft onto your branches to help you get where you want?  What behaviours do you need to add, what systems or routines can you add?  Do you need to make space for recreation and down time?  Think about it.

Step 6. Practice what I call thought hygiene. Traditionally, when hard cuts have been made to trees, the vulnerable are can be exposed to viruses or diseases, so a salve of some kind is applied to protect the site until the tree can heal the wound. Our unconscious hates change and you may find that all sorts of negative thoughts, fears and doubts can rise up when we make changes – even when they are for good. So be aware of that, thank your old brain for caring but boldly go to where you consciously need to go to live the life you want.

Finally –it may be a bit shocking at first.  Any plant pruned right back for maximum fruit bearing may look like it is never going to recover.  This is where you are going to need some courage and have faith.  Spring will come and the life force will flow through the tree and your freshly pruned life. Stay with it, don’t give up.  Keep nurturing and cherishing yourself as much as you would your favourite rose bush. It’s the way of nature and it applies to you as well

There’s a wise old saying about pruning. What you are aiming for is to clear out the dead wood in the middle of the thicket to enable oxygen to get into the plant and have enough room for a bird to fly through.  We all need oxygen in our lives and we all need space for miracles to show up!  So get pruning!

This has been a bit of a long read but I think is a useful one for so many of you.   I am putting together a workshop on this if any of you are interested - it’s a useful exercise to do at any time of your life. Please email on keren@professionalcountrywoman.com me if you are interested in finding out more.