​Reader,​

I was standing in front of my garden, glaring at the zucchini that refused to give me a zucchini.

It had a million flowers, looked healthy, but wasn’t giving me what I worked so hard for.

All I could think was, When did I become so bad at gardening? Just another thing that I dropped the ball on this summer.

Of course, as I walked out to the garden, I had completely ignored the two enormous overflowing bowls of tomatoes on the kitchen counter, the bags of Swiss chard in the freezer, chopped and ready to be dropped into fall recipes, and so many grapes waiting to be picked I’d have jars of jam until 2030.

I had also conveniently forgotten how we had salads nonstop this summer because the butter lettuce went above and beyond.

And I definitely was not thinking about how I had ended up with four random pumpkin plants growing in the middle of the lawn, and beds full of sunflowers, bee balm, black-eyed Susans and daisies that somehow magically appeared without me planting them.

No, I was clearly a crap gardener because my zucchini and cucumbers wouldn’t produce.

It took my next-door neighbor leaning over the fence and asking how I kept everything so lush and green, without watering during a drought, to snap me out of it.

I couldn’t see what was in front of me until someone outside shared a completely different view of it.

For me, a successful garden has somehow ended up as one that produces what I want when I want it. (And yes, I’m aware – reading that last sentence, the me not standing knee-deep in failed zucchini totally understands that’s not even how gardens work.)

But “successful gardener” me, covered in dirt with nary a zucchini in sight, was seeing things from a completely different place.

How I was defining success was made up of so much more than whether or not a zucchini showed up.

Underneath the simple "fact" that I was failing at gardening were layers I hadn't looked at.

An assumption that hard work should equal the result I wanted. A belief that a good gardener makes things grow. A story that kept repeating about the idea that the garden isn't producing, so I must have done something to deserve it. And a role I was measuring myself against without knowing it – someone who knows what she's doing and gets results.

But I couldn’t see that from where I was standing. Instead, all of those things collapsed into an oversimplified statement of:

My garden isn’t successful.

There’s so much that goes into whether or not we experience success. It doesn’t matter if it’s our gardens, our relationships or our small businesses.

And rarely do we stop to question or sort all the pieces out when we’re in the middle of it. It just forms into things that feel true…

This isn’t working.

I’m not good at this.

I should be further along.

And once we’ve decided something is true, we start looking at everything through that lens.

For me, that meant fixating on the one thing that wasn't working while ignoring almost everything that was.

Was the zucchini a problem? Yes. Was I a failed gardener? No. Once I stopped using it as the only evidence that counted, the rest of the garden came back into view – the fruit trees that made it through their first year, the seeds I'd saved for spring, the habitat I'd spent all summer building.

My garden didn't need to change. How I was looking at it needed an update.

That's the kind of shift Viewfinder is built around. You’re not talking yourself into everything being fine. You’re getting enough distance to see what's defining your view in the first place.

​Click here to get more details on how to see what’s shaping your view.