The Flower That Needed More

On Thursday night, I asked a room full of women to draw a flower.

Not as an icebreaker. As an actual mirror.

What color is it, I asked. Why this color? Is it thriving, or fading? Is it a bud, blooming, or withering? Is it in the ground, or has it been cut? What does it need, to become the best version of itself?

More than one woman, drawing their own flowers, wrote some version of the same sentence. Different petals, different colors, different pages — but underneath, the same handwriting, more or less: I am not being watered enough. I need more sunlight and attention. I need more stability.

Here's what I didn't expect, even though I built the exercise myself: nobody drew a wilted flower and left it there. Every single woman went on to describe what her flower needed to come back. Not what was wrong with it. What it needed.

"That distinction is the whole job, as far as I'm concerned."

A wilting flower is not a broken flower. It's a flower that's been asked to bloom in every season, for every person, without anyone checking whether it had water. It doesn't need to become a different flower. It needs someone — often for the first time in a long time — to ask what it actually needs, and then to take that seriously.

That's not fixing. Fixing assumes something is wrong with the flower itself. This is tending. It assumes the flower was always going to be beautiful — it just needed conditions that let it be.

I think a lot of us are fading flowers who've gotten very good at looking like we're in full bloom. We perform resilience because someone, somewhere, told us that's what strong women do. We say “I'm fine” in the exact tone that means we've stopped expecting anyone to ask twice. We water everyone around us and quietly forget we're a plant too.

Coaching, done right, is not a pep talk that tells the wilting flower to stand up straighter. It's the slow, unglamorous work of asking: what do you actually need? Who gave you the story that you're not allowed to need it? What would it look like to let yourself be watered?

"You don't become a different flower. You become the one you already were, before the drought."

You are not here to be fixed. You are here to unfold.