When Your Practice Isn’t Growing

Have you ever felt as though you’ve been faithfully tending your practice…

…watering it, caring for it, showing up for it…

…and still it doesn’t seem to grow the way you hoped?

You have the training.

You care deeply about the people you serve.

Your clients leave feeling seen, supported, and transformed.

And still, the practice itself doesn’t seem to gather momentum.

For a long time, I assumed I just needed to work harder.

Then I began wondering if I was asking the wrong question.

What if you’ve been watering faithfully…

…but no one ever prepared the soil?

I Kept Looking at the Plant

For a long time, I assumed that when something wasn’t growing, the problem must be the people involved — including me.

Maybe we needed more commitment.

More confidence.

A better strategy.

If something wasn’t flourishing, surely someone wasn’t doing enough.

It took me years to realize I’d been looking at the plant when I should have been looking at the soil.

A healthy plant can only grow in conditions that support its growth.

No amount of watering can compensate for soil that hasn’t been prepared.

 Who’s tending the garden?

A few years ago I sat in an online meeting with a professor named Gino Yu from Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He was describing a vision he called Come2Unity — a hub where practitioners from many healing disciplines could find one another, collaborate, and create a healthier ecosystem for their work.

He understood that healers were isolated. He understood that different disciplines needed ways to refer clients, share resources, and build something together rather than working in parallel silos. His vision resonated deeply. The needs he was describing were real — needs I had seen in my own work and in the practices of people I’d coached.

I wanted to say yes. But as I listened, something familiar began to emerge. Not disagreement. Recognition.

Imagine someone says: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone in the neighbourhood planted vegetables together?”

Everyone smiles.

Of course.

Who wouldn’t want that?

Then someone asks: Who waters while people are on vacation?

Who weeds? Who repairs the fence?

Who organizes the planting days? Who welcomes new gardeners?

Who keeps track of what’s growing where?

Suddenly you realize: The garden won’t flourish simply because everyone loves gardening. It flourishes because someone tends the conditions.

In this case, the proposal asked practitioners — people already running full practices —to tend the very garden that was meant to nourish them. And underneath all of it, an assumption that passion and shared purpose would be enough to hold it together.

I began realizing that the vision wasn’t missing beautiful plants.

The practitioners, commitment and good ideas were already there. What was missing was the structure that would allow those good intentions to become sustainable — including someone with the time, role and responsibility to tend the relationships and hold the pieces together.

Years ago my friend, Dr. Boniface Etuk, gave me language for what I was seeing. Every living system needs stewardship. Someone has to prepare and tend the relationships, the rhythms, the practical details that allow everyone else to flourish.

What Is Your Practice Asking For?

When a garden isn’t thriving, we don’t usually blame the tomatoes. We become curious about the conditions.

Is the soil healthy? Is there enough sunlight?

Too much water? Not enough?

Has the garden simply outgrown the space it was planted in?

Our businesses are often the same.

In a business, those conditions aren’t only about you — your confidence, energy or commitment. They’re structural too: how work is organized, where your time goes, what roles exist, how clients find their way to you, and whether what you notice can actually become something you do.

When something feels stalled, it’s tempting to assume we need another course, another certification, another marketing strategy.

Sometimes that’s true.

Often it isn’t.

Sometimes your practice isn’t asking you to become more.

It’s asking you to tend what already exists.

That might mean asking:

• Is your garden easy to find? Or is it hidden behind an overgrown hedge?
• Once someone wanders into your garden, is there a welcoming path to follow? Or are they left wondering where to go next?
• Have you planted more than you can realistically tend this season?
• Who helps tend your garden when you’re tired?
• Are you trying to be the gardener, the soil, the rain, and the sunshine?

So when your practice feels stuck, maybe the first question isn’t:

“What’s wrong with me?”

Maybe it’s:

“What is my practice asking me to tend next?”

 In my own work, that usually leads me to look a little deeper.

Are you tending the relationships and rhythms that allow your practice to remain sustainable, responsive and alive?

Because the knowing is often already there. The question is whether your business has the conditions to receive that knowing — and the structure to let you act on it.

Are you being held by something, or holding everything alone?

You Don’t Have to Tend the Garden Alone

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about healthy gardens is that they aren’t sustained by bursts of effort.

They’re sustained by rhythms of tending.

Preparing the soil.

Watering when it’s needed.

Pulling the occasional weed.

Not because the garden is failing, but because that’s simply what living things require.

Our practices aren’t so different.

A healthy practice isn’t something you design correctly once and then leave running. Like a garden, it’s a relationship you keep tending as conditions change.

The sessions you offer, the conversations you have, the clients you serve — those are the flowers people see.

But what allows them to bloom?

What are you doing to tend the soil beneath them?

Who’s helping you notice what your practice is asking for next?

Who’s reminding you that every season has different work?

You don’t need a perfect garden.

You don’t need every answer before you plant the next seed.

You simply need to keep tending what wants to grow.

That’s the conversation I love having with practitioners.

Not, “How do we fix your business?”

But, “What is your practice becoming, and what would help it flourish?”
 
 

Jan Anderson
Your Healing Business
Jan@YourHealingBusiness.com

P.S. What part of your practice is asking you to tend it differently? I’d love to hear what’s alive for you in this. Leave a comment below — or if you’d like someone to tend those questions alongside you, let’s have a conversation.