I was late to plant my vegetable seeds this year. Due to Defra restrictions to prevent avian flu, our chickens were living in our polytunnel until the end of March. It then needed digging over and the raised beds building for this year, as well as some plans for irrigation. We don’t have any staging in there yet, and I don’t have a greenhouse here in which to start my seedlings. And so because it seemed complicated and I didn’t have much energy due to ongoing health irritations, we reached the second weekend in April without any seeds planted. I could have conceded, as I did last year, and bought seedlings to plant out, but that seemed like a lazy option and I knew taking a shortcut makes me feel less proud of the results. Plus I have accumulated a stockpile of seeds that needs to be used, and the kids love planting, so that is what we spent the first weekend of the Easter holidays doing. Thankfully most of them have sprouted quickly and just reached the size where I have started planting them out (though some have not grown at all).

It struck me whilst I was planting out the seedlings and topping up the seed trays that sowing seeds is an act of faith that they will sprout and grow to produce plants, flowers, fruit or vegetables given time and nurture. Whilst generally the freshest largest seeds do the best, that isn’t always the case as weather conditions and wildlife can easily disrupt your plans in the garden. Sometimes the most promising looking seeds don’t lead to viable plants, or the most lush looking plants fail to produce fruit, whilst the least promising looking seeds or most straggly plants can sometimes surprise you with an abundant harvest down the line. Some of the outcome depends on skill, some on diligence and some on factors outside of our control. Each time you have to prepare the soil, sow the seed and water it regularly to see what comes out. It is an investment of resources and energy that will hopefully be repaid in the future. That idea was resonant for me for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I am trying to invest effort in improving my physical health. The motivation for that comes from looking forward into the prospective futures available to me, and how my health and fitness will affect me and my family. It has become much clearer that what I eat today, or the exercise I do or don’t do, has an impact on me that I’ll feel in the future. I’m making an effort to be more active, get enough sleep and to eat more vegetables and less processed food (I’m a big fan of spring greens at the moment – they are so cheap to buy, but are deliciously sweet and tasty, as well as being seasonal and grown in the UK). So far I have lost 10lbs but I have bigger goals, and want this to be the beginning of cumulative changes in my life. I want my kids to have an active, happy Mum who does lots of stuff with them, rather than a perpetually tired Mum who is preoccupied with work stress. There is a famous Reddit post that talks about non-zero days and effort being a gift from past you to future you that I would recommend reading if you haven’t stumbled upon it yet.

Investing energy for the future potential also connects to the wider theme of working in mental health – where we and the client invest time and energy in trying to make the future better for them – and also that of trying to make a career in psychology. As application season passes on the forum, we can see the hope and heartache that this involves. Many people become almost obsessional about checking the forum for news of when courses have short-listed, and when the offer letters come out – so much so that it completely changes the traffic pattern to the forum (which normally has an average visit time of over 10 minutes, in which the typical user views many pages, but has two months per year in which repeat checkers raise the number of visits, but bring the average visit time down to 2 minutes, often just viewing a single page over and over again).

The early years of most psychology’ careers are seen as an investment necessary to pass the career bottleneck of being selected for training. Prior to that, many applicants feel they are gambling their time on a potential future that may never happen. There is a sense of trying to tick boxes, but not knowing exactly what the boxes are, or why they are necessary which I think needs to be explored and challenged. For many people, it seems like those early stages feel pointless in and of themselves. They are not seen as a long term career plan, and are therefore easily dismissed as being worthless except to jump hoops to try to gain a clinical training place, but I think they have merit in their own right. Many people gain great satisfaction from doing these “low level” care jobs, and they are invaluable in the daily lives of many people in their times of greatest need. They are also a fantastic way in which you can gain and apply the basic psychological skills of listening, empathy and compassion to client’s lives, and to experience the ways that the system around them can help or hinder their wellbeing. Being a mindful and reflective frontline care worker (or researcher) is the time at which people engage the most in the lives of clients, and ensures that the advice we give later down the line is grounded in reality. It also lets us experience the hard work and competing pressures of the staff we may end up advising from the lofty perch of being a qualified health professional, so it is a shame to see so many people horizon gazing to the detriment of getting the most out of the moment they are in.

The same theme of investing time and energy to create something for the future is true in setting up a small business. All over the country people are ploughing in their own money and time to set up small ventures, despite the time involved being more than full-time hours and the initial return often being much less than minimum wage. I hadn’t realised when I set out that even when the business has been running for a while, you often end up having to repeat this process over and over again. As staff move on, or contracts change, or the balance of work stops being enjoyable, or you hit hurdles along the way you have to regroup and use the available resources to fulfil your commitments, or even to start over in a new direction. That process can be disheartening, but it can also be an opportunity for growth, and is a good reminder for those running a business to take a step back and look again at the short, middle and long-term goals of the business and the methods used to achieve them. It is hard when a business feels so personal to lose a member of staff, or to have to step away from a long-standing contract or area of work, but it can allow you to invest more energy in trying to plan the business you want to create.

The toughest part of running a business rather than being self-employed is wanting to do the right thing for your employees, whilst also achieving the aims of the business and creating an enjoyable role (and some profit) for yourself. It can be particularly hard to make good financial and business decisions as a caring, empathic, progressive person who wants to do the right thing by everybody else involved, so it is extra important to have good business and financial advice if you are not just responsible for yourself, and your own plans for the future. The owner of the business is always the last to get paid, and feels responsible for the well-being of every other member of staff – even though for them it feels more like a job, and less like a personal mission.

In a social business we are also the ones responsible for deciding how we provide our services, and what the focus will be. There is endless demand for my services as a court expert witness, as a trainer and consultant to the residential and foster care sector, but I know if I get too swept up into delivering services personally I don’t leave enough capacity to steer the business. So I have to pick and choose the activities that best align with my long-term goals. I have to plan the future of my company in a way that has the most impact on recipients and creates a financial reward for me and my employees in the future. That “triple bottom line” of caring about people (employees and service recipients) and the planet (systems and wider issues) as well as profit (earning enough to pay employees and yourself) is part of the joy and challenge of running a socially worthwhile business.

The sheer number of choices and possibilities can be quite overwhelming at times, and each decision feels like it needs knowledge that I don’t have to make it in an informed way. For example, I need to decide whether to formalise the social enterprise structure within which we deliver our outcome measurement tools. If we do it will open doors to sources of investment that might allow us to scale more rapidly and would be closed to a traditional company. However investment always comes with strings attached and can easily change the direction of the company, or reduce the autonomy with which it operates. It feels similar to decide on a new office base. Do I rent a serviced office, commit to a 3 year rental of a unit on a local farm, or get a business loan and purchase a small building? What if we need to grow or shrink so that this choice doesn’t fit the company structure in 12 months time?

It is hard to predict the future impact of seemingly small choices in the present. I can see why anxiety can sometimes make these choices overwhelming, as it is easy to end up with endless background research and tables of pros and cons that are immobilising. I’m sometimes tempted to make them with a coin toss* or a counting rhyme as we did on the playground at primary school. Like sowing seeds, we just have to research and plan the best we can within reasonable time constraints and then follow the instructions and see what grows!

 

*I was once told to toss a coin and then check if your reaction was relief or to want to make it “best of three” and to then follow your gut rather than the result. It seems as good a method of decision making as any other.