When you're in the garden digging and planting, watering and weeding, you don't always think how beneficial it is for, not only your strategic creative mind, but your mental health as a whole. While it's obvious gardening certainly involves the care and feeding of plants, it can also have far-reaching effects on your ability to think clearly. For most of us, to yield a bigger and better creative harvest, you need to have a healthy mind. And like a garden, it needs to be maintained and cared for to achieve the results you want. When you do? The benefits are endless and you take home the fruits of your labour. Not to mention great creative ideas and insightful strategies.

Much like other forms of inspiration, gardening may serve as a springboard for new ideas or plans, as well as a platform for developing your sense of identity and connecting with the world around you. Similar to creativity and strategy, gardening can get messy. This might be simply because it's such such a hands-on activity involving literal dirt. But dirt, or no dirt, when you use your hands things tend to get creative and strategic by nature.

Embrace Your Surroundings

At some point, all creative ideas involve nature at some atomic level. So, when you can find the time and space, gardening allows you to thoroughly immerse yourself in the peacefulness the world offers, and it can help you establish a reconnection with the earth. Even on a daily basis. When you're out there, listening to the birds chirping, feeling the wind, seeing the great blue sky above you, your senses are heightened, you're more likely to be inspired, and you're lucky enough to be in an environment that is conducive for learning, gratitude, and growth. Add in the sensory experience of garden itself, the sounds, scents, and textures, and you have a petri dish for entirely new ideas and perspectives to form together as your mind subconsciously works its magic. Gardening is good for your mind, and your mind is good for marketing.

Plant Seeds for Great Ideas

Gardening is great for developing ideas through mindfulness because it encourages focus, attention to detail, and being in the present. Paying close attention to the needs of plants and soil, and then watching those plants and soil bloom as a result of your care, helps you become more attuned to your immediate surroundings. When this happens, it removes mental clutter and distractions so our creative concepts and ideas can come to the surface. Learning new things about your land, biology, the cycles of the moon and the seasons, can help open your mind to new story archetypes, new historical meanings, and new perspectives on how humans are connected through time. These thoughts are put in your creative hopper, and later on, you collide them with other things in your mind to create brand new cool ideas you would have never thought about had you not planted those little seeds.

Problem Solving at the Root

When you tend to a garden, much like you tend to business, we battle against the surrounding elements, against our schedules, and against factors we can't control. But unlike business, when we're out there, we help release some stress that builds up in the other parts of our life, in a less serious environment that connects you with yourself and the real world around you. You can focus on what, and who really matters. But make no mistake, it's not all flowers and butterflies, in the garden, like in life, there can be pitfalls and time wasters that have a negative impact on the progress you're trying to make.

As a result, gardeners must be flexible and creative in order to meet these ever-changing demands. Plant selection, layout, and the management of pests or unfavourable environmental conditions, all need a creative solution to be dealt with. And each solution is unique to the problem itself. And with this repetitious problem-solving practice, you become more open to new solutions you may not have heard of before. This type of learning, which means making mistakes as we go, encourages an innovative and persevering mindset by forcing you to use your imagination and try out new approaches. This means you're more prone to think of novel ideas to old problems. Practicing gardening teaches us to be resilient and adaptable, qualities that are essential to any form of artistic expression, which is a form of self-care. Marketing self-care.

Plan to Love Your Hard Work

When we dig into new business in marketing, there's typically a discovery phase. That's where we learn and plan. It makes us feel more comfortable knowing what to expect before we start to work. And it makes the objectives easier to measure knowing we spent the right time doing the right things. During this time we spend a lot of hours looking around and thinking about how we can improve or impact things on a brand or business. But we often don't take enough time to love the work we actually do when we do it. That's important for both marketing self-care and for self-care at home or outside in a garden.

Exploring the garden's varying hues, contours, and surfaces is a treat for the eyes and the senses. After all, it's where all human design draws its inspiration. In this respect, the garden provides abundant benefits that help fill you with wonder time and time again, similar to seeing new exhibits at a museum or reading a great book. Plants offer a multi-sensory experience, with their aromas and different textures stirring up emotions and inspiring new associations in the mind. This direct sensory experience with the plants helps unlock your creative potential by associating what you're seeing and smelling with a safe environment where fear and anxiety can be lifted away to clear your mind for great ideas.

Wax Beans On, Wax Beans Off

Those who master the art of gardening learn to be patient and persistent. Those who master the art of creativity and strategy learn the same. Because they are all ongoing processes, which require great patience, perseverance, and precision. As a marketer, these are essential qualities to have. When you're sowing seeds, and a few weeks later caring for young plants, and few more weeks later finally seeing mature plants bloom, reminds us of the lessons in delayed satisfaction. To make a client relationship great, to make a relationship with yourself great, you need to learn discipline and how to appreciate the trip itself rather than stay focused just on the end result. The skills of a marketer are earned through the dedication, patience, and trust in the natural rhythm of growth. These same skills can be honed through the practice of gardening. The same skills essential to the creative process.

Marketing is More Than Numbers. So is Gardening.

The feeling when you post and it gets just one like, is similar to the feeling when you plant it grows just one leek. You can feel the fear of failure start to creep over you. But seasoned gardeners, and marketers, know that it's because the result is more than just a means to an end—it's a formative learning experience that encourages us to move on and find what works. Creative problem solving and idea generation are at the core of what we do. So, get your hands on some gardening tools, and let your mind wander as you explore the wonderful world of creativity.