Staying Grounded in the Busy Season
Oops, forgot to meditate!
Happy June! The white birch and oak trees are in full bloom here in Connecticut, and I’m ready for summer to take off!
This is the time of year when we’re sorting out all the final details for the upcoming weddings we’ve been working on for months. I’m also getting ready to head to Detroit in a couple weeks for my biggest gig of the year when I design and install the plants and flowers for the Rocket Mortgage Classic PGA tournament. This will be my sixth year working on the tournament as the floral and plant designer, and each year I learn boat loads of new information—about my floral and plant design, my business practices, and myself.
Designing the flowers and plants for golf tournaments has become an annual highlight. It reminds me of a time in my life that felt too good to be true. In early 2021, I lived in Puerto Rico for three months. One of my favorite parts about the trip was the amount of time I spent outdoors. Monday through Friday, I sat at the picnic table in my backyard—a stone’s throw from the beach—and worked from paradise. I started the day with meditation, coffee, and yoga on the patio, and I walked the beach on my work breaks and weekends. Doing floral for golf tournaments takes me right back to that peaceful, outside all day everyday feeling.
Being Well on Big Events
Last year, my best friend sent me a message during the Rocket Mortgage event saying “I would love to know how you stay grounded during an event this massive!” A four-day event in the summer, with 10 days of setup, a full team of freelance talent to manage, hundreds of plants and flowers to keep alive and fresh, and a cleanup requirement is a huge undertaking and methodical planning is key. The countless lessons I’ve learned and apply each year have truly helped me so much in making this event a success season after season.
I have plenty of practical business tips on generating ideas, planning, and building a team, but the insights I really want to share with you are even more foundational. When I’m planning and executing an event like this, I cannot do right by my business if I’m not doing right by myself. As the owner and the designer in my floral business, I am often the hands-on-stems as well as the person seeking, signing, negotiating, and handling clients. If I melt down or allow my stress or my health to undermine my ability to be present at these events, I’m liable to actually hurt myself or my team and negatively impact my client relationships.
Below are my three biggest guidelines—not just for pulling off an outdoor event of this scale, but for staying grounded before, during, and after I get boots on the ground.
1. Be the expert. My second year of work on this tournament was the most challenging. In the first year, I had designed the flowers for the grounds’ interiors—the hospitality suites, the top player’s rooms, the clubhouse, and so on. It went so well that the next year, they asked me to take over the plants for the exterior of the ground. Adding flowers to the clubhouse exterior and the golf course grounds was so intimidating to me! I remember setting a meeting with one of my clients to go through each line item of the invoice to ensure that everything looked good before I placed the order. I organized the meeting and as we started to go through each line of the order, which was probably about 5-6 pages long, my client said to me, “Martha, you’re the expert—we don’t need to go through the order line by line.” It was the most empowering line that I had ever been told in business, and I don’t even think that Christie, my client, realized how much of a favor she was doing me by saying that.
The theme of empowerment comes up a lot in my business, especially as I take on bigger clients and get more exciting opportunities. But it shows up powerfully in the early stages of any large contract, especially when I might be overwhelmed by the vast possibilities and the uncertainty of how a new client will respond. When I start to freeze, I channel my power by taking one small action—even if it’s just making a sketch, jotting down an outline, or starting a Pinterest board. One small action gets the power flowing.
2. Lead with love. Instead of leading with fear and anxiety like I used to, I’ve been coaching myself on leading with love first. I’ll close my eyes and envision the outcome, which looks something like this: I’m at the event where all of my design work looks phenomenal. The plants are lush and happy, the sky is blue, the sun is shining, and the air smells like just watered grass. My client is happy, life is good, and the games begin. This visualization fuels my work into actionable steps. Procrastination can’t exist anymore because I’m too excited about the outcome.
A vision of love bleeds into so many areas of the hands-on work of a golf tournament, but perhaps nowhere more vitally than in working with teams. I so look forward to building an amazing team of talent and busting our butts together, ending every evening with laughs and stories as we water up the plants for the next day. We make sure we’re all hydrated and sun-lotioned; when we take care of each other, the teamwork takes care of itself.
3. Make the business work for you. I once read a line from a well-known floral designer’s Instagram post (like, she’s a big deal and has thousands of followers). She said something like, “taking care of our health and needs cannot exist in the floral industry.” I disagree. We make the time for what’s important to us. I’ve learned to make my business work for me instead of letting my business run me.
With some planning, I make it work. My work days during the setup and the event have looked a little like this:
5:30am Wake up
6am Meditate, Yoga, Make Breakfast, Shower
8am-noon Work at golf course
Noon Go back to AirBnB for lunch
1-5pm Work at golf course
My evenings have sometimes been spent meeting up with Detroit friends, but mostly I’ll go back to my Airbnb, make dinner, shower, and watch some Netflix until I fall asleep around 9 or so.
Last year, I kept a report of each day, tracking the weather and how that influenced the plants and any special notes that could help out my future self when planning for the next year.
I got a kick out of reading my notes from last year, especially the part when I noted “Pretty sure I stopped meditating this week,” the day after the thirty massive oak trees came down. Meditation and prayer have become a regular practice for me, in life, but also when I’m dealing with challenges that would come up in work. I find that I can build a solid foundation to my day and handle obstacles with more ease when I meditate in the morning, acknowledge my concerns, and ask for help and guidance from my spirit guides (like my grandparents). Even though I “missed” a few days of morning meditation, I know that all those meditation days in that first week of work helped me handle the challenges that I faced during the second week.
Another aspect of making the event work for me is planning for contingencies. Sure, I watch the weather so that my plants aren’t destroyed by a fallen oak tree (or 30 fallen oak trees, as almost happened last year) or scorched by record heat. But if I can plan enough to avoid complete catastrophe, then—happily—I can plan enough to avoid crisis mode for my own body and mind.
How I’m Prepping Now
Leading up to this year’s tournament, my checklists are coming together and my favorite part of the job is just around the corner. I’m getting ahead of my self-care routine by making sure it’s well-established by the time I hit the ground running in Detroit.
I’m hoping to keep a meditation practice on all work days. Today, my current morning routine is to journal first thing. I’m going to the gym almost daily, getting cardio and working with weights and, along with my spiritual practices, I hope I can keep this part of my healthy routine going when I’m in Detroit. Rick Rubin’s audiobook is keeping me creatively inspired, Gabby Bernstein is helping me stay positive and committed to my integrity, and The Giggly Squad podcast always helps me stay lighthearted and laughing. I’ll bring these audio-friends with me on the trip to Detroit.
The days of the actual event are the product of all my planning days. I know I will truly love everything that I present because of all of the hard work that my team and I are putting into the planning stages now. Kind of a metaphor for life, no?