This week’s blog post is focused on the second of three types of pruning needed to reach your future vision, removing sick and diseased branches that are never going to make it.
Necessary Endings, by Henry Cloud, PhD, compares necessary endings in life to pruning a plant; we must first have a vision of the future looks like and then prune away things that don’t fit. “When you prune a plant, it’s a process of proactive endings. It turns out that a plant cannot reach its full potential without a very systemic process of pruning.”
Three Types of Pruning
He contends that there are three types of pruning one must do in order to reach the vision you have in your mind; pruning away the good to make room for the great, pruning away sick or diseased branches that aren’t going to make it and pruning away branches and buds that are dead. Check out the first post in the series here.
Sick or diseased branches are a drain on the energy resources of the plant. They can also infect the rest of the plant and hold back production, potentially destroying buds that have a chance at being great.
Pruning the Sick or Diseased Branches
I saw this in my raspberry patch early this summer. I had so many raspberry canes growing in my patch you couldn’t see the ground. The patch was thick with raspberry bushes and all of them had lots of blooms! BUT, those crowded raspberries couldn’t produce the berries that I could see developing on the bushes.
I started seeing yellow spots on leaves and the berries that were developing had big white patches on them. Many of the blossoms were not developing into fruits. So I diligently went online to figure out why my raspberries were looking so badly. It turns out that crowded raspberry bushes don’t produce well and they are a recipe for diseases that can wipe out the entire patch.
I had to go into the patch and cut out more than 50 percent of the branches that made up the bushes. That was a hard thing to do. I had visions of those raspberries. I was already eating them in my mind….and they tasted really good! But in order to save my plants and get a crop of any kind, I had to cut those branches that weren’t going to make it out of the bushes.
Results of Pruning
And guess what? I have a bumper crop of raspberries this fall. I’ve picked more raspberries off the reduced number of bushes than I’ve ever had before. We’re eating raspberries, making pies and jam and sharing the raspberries with others. Because I pruned out the sick and diseased branches, my raspberry patch is much healthier and more productive.
Your Personal Brand benefits from pruning away those things that are sick or diseased, also. Each of us has only a finite amount of time, energy, talent, passion and money. Engaging Your Personal Brand in endeavors that are sick or diseased, unable to produce fruit, is counterproductive. The future fruit of your labors depends on your ability to do.
Where do you need to recognize and prune away sick or diseased branches so that the healthy branches of your life have energy to grow?
