How to Practice Compassion Toward Yourself and Your Clients
Compassion is a regenerative emotion, which means it can rejuvenate your body and erase limiting beliefs. By incorporating compassion in your life, you'll likely be led to make wiser decisions and build healthy, long-lasting relationships. As you can imagine, this can have a significant impact on your work environment—whether you're a flower farmer, a shop owner, or an event florist.
You can practice compassion in two ways:
Toward others: Taking the time to understand others and their situations will create space for patience and kindness.
Toward ourselves: Self-compassion will help you to set intentional and responsible limits for yourself and others.
Practicing Self-Compassion
Perhaps you are starting a business, or maybe you own one already. If so, you're probably in charge of every process, from finding the ideal customer and obtaining the right material for designs to building healthy and long-lasting relationships with providers, customers, colleagues, and team members. Because of all of these responsibilities, it's essential to understand the importance of setting limits for yourself, knowing your circumstances, and learning when and where to say yes or no.
Compassion for yourself will help you to understand that it is okay to pause and consider what is truly important to you and your business—both the strategies that you need to implement and the amazing designs that will come. Also, practicing self-compassion allows you to feel worthy of a fair return on investment and receive a great appreciation for your work.
Practicing Compassion for Others
Practicing compassion helps you prepare for, recover from, or adapt to all of your daily challenges. It allows you to objectively see and understand other people's point of view as well as prepare for challenges a business can bring on.
When you practice compassion for others, you’ll find motivation as you experience positive emotions like appreciation and gratitude. Most importantly, you’ll be showing love to your clients and their dreams through flowers.
The success of your business comes from a passion for what you do. When you're living out your passion, it makes it easy to start practicing compassion. Both are emotions that are born in the heart and act as our fuel. Where there is no passion, there is no inspiration—and you can lose the will to work to the best of your ability. When you lose enjoyment in what you do, your compassion for clients can die along with it!
Here Are a Few Ways You Can Practice Compassion:
Listen to your clients. Whether they're singing your praises or giving a complaint, you'll be surprised by how far being heard goes.
Give grace. Don't expect your clients to know everything that you know! They're coming to you for a reason—they don't know that it may cost $10 a stem for a Cafe Latte rose, that you need to be able to pay a team for a large install, or that you spend hours upon hours in the fields every day.
Answer questions. Even if you think the questions are silly, there's a reason they are being asked.
Give gifts. Perhaps an older gentleman is in your shop to buy flowers for his sick wife, or maybe a bride in a tough spot comes to you with a budget that is nonexistent. Don't let the love of money overcome your love for people.
Say no. If you stretch yourself too thin, your business, your mental state, and your health will begin to suffer.
Now, go out there and love the world (and yourself!) through flowers!
Photography: Heather & Jake Photography
Flowers Arranged by Kelly Perry.
