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I Don't Like Beans! A simple lesson on choosing what your really want in your life Adrienne was a client of mine for nearly two years. I remember a conversation we had early on that made such an impression on me that I noted it down.  Here is the gist of the conversation. It seems there was a tripod in Adrienne's garden that she had previously planted with sweet peas. Sweet Peas are beautiful flowers, but when they go to seed, they can become a weed. This had happened in Adrienne's garden, so she had to rip them all out. This left a vacant tripod in the middle of her garden, which this year she decided to plant with beans. One beautiful spring morning Adrienne was in her garden watering and suddenly she realized: "I don't LIKE beans!" "Why", she asked herself, "did I plant them?" Yes, she wanted to fill that blank and  vacant tripod... but why BEANS? Then she realized that this was a metaphore for her entire life. She had "planted beans" everywhere. These were all the things, promises, projects that she neither liked nor wanted but she had used them to "filled up her space". There were the conferences she had attended that neither nurtured nor educated her, nor did they forward her business. There were the customers she had acquired who were neither fun nor particularly profitable. There were projects she was working on for which she had no real passion; they were, at best, tangential to her values and reason for being in business. She had employed contractors who were more headache than they were worth. All of them beans, all of them filling up her precious space and her life. Now she recognized them for what they were. They were "second best", "getting by", "putting up with", "tolerating". And she had put them all there. Adrienne still has both her garden and her business. She no longer plants beans.

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