Hi, friend.

I walked out to the garden this morning and my lavender is dying. Again.

I planted it a few weeks ago, and this time I planted it with hope. I told myself this would be the one that made it. Then the rain came, weeks of it, and this morning the leaves are gray and limp and the whole plant looks like it has given up.

This is not my first failed lavender. It is not my second. I keep planting it, it keeps dying, and every single time I have asked myself the same question.

What am I doing wrong?

Here is what I finally let myself hear this morning. Maybe I am not doing anything wrong. Maybe I am just trying to grow the wrong plant in the wrong place.

Lavender wants dry feet, sharp drainage, lean soil, and a hot Mediterranean hillside. I have humid North Georgia and a spring that floods. I can water it perfectly, feed it perfectly, and watch over it perfectly, but the conditions will still rot the roots. The plant is not failing me. I am asking it to live somewhere it was never built to survive.

That is information, not failure.

And it stopped me cold, because I have done the exact same thing as a leader.

I have poured into a hire who never quite took. I have relaunched an initiative for the third time, with hope, certain that this time the effort would be enough. I have stood over something that kept dying and asked what am I doing wrong, when the more honest question was sitting right there the whole time.

Is this the right thing for these conditions?

That is a different question, and it changes everything.

Because "what am I doing wrong" keeps you tending. It keeps you watering. It keeps you blaming your effort, or worse, blaming your people, when the problem was never the effort or the people. The problem was the design. You put a good thing in a place that could not hold it.

Now hear me clearly. I am not telling you to give up on hard things. Some plants are worth amending the whole bed for. Some are worth a raised mound, a pile of gravel, and a sunnier spot. That is a real choice, and sometimes the right one.

But it is a choice you can only make once you stop asking the wrong question.

So here is the one thing I would offer you this week.

Think of the lavender in your work. The new hire, the project, the meeting, the relationship you keep tending and keep watching wilt. Before you pour in more effort, ask the other question first. Is this struggling because I have not done enough, or because I keep asking it to live in conditions that were never going to work?

Sit with the answer honestly. It might tell you to dig in and change the soil. It might tell you to plant something else here, and move the lavender to where it actually belongs.

Either way, you stop drowning the thing you were trying to save.

I do not know yet if this one will live. I am going to give it a pot with a lot of gravel, put it in full sun, and if it still dies, I am finally going to believe what it has been telling me for three years.

Now I want to hear from you. What is your lavender? Hit reply and tell me. I read every email.

And remember as always, "We are better together."

P.S. Here’s the Amazon link to my book: https://a.co/d/1QpVuFi