82. The leaks in your bucket

This is a short but powerful one.

This is an archive episode I'd forgotten I recorded, and this unexpectedly moving parable was exactly what I needed to hear.

Hope it lands in the same way for you -- encouraging you and cheering you on in your perfectly imperfect human business journey.

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I’m Simone Grace Seol. Let me help you build community care, social responsibility, and spirituality into every part of your business.

📩 My emails — my most intimate writing, sent in real time: simonegraceseol.com/get-emails

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Transcript

Hello, my friends. You're listening to Liberatory Business, and I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for joining me. I'm bringing back some old episodes from my archived podcast that I think very much stand the test of time — they're just as useful now as they were back then. And this one, I forgot I'd even recorded it. I listened to it again and I was so moved. I was like, oh, we need this message now maybe even more than we ever did before. So I hope you listen and enjoy.

The story of the two buckets

I want to tell you a little story today. I want to read you a story I found on Facebook — it was one of those comic-strip sort of images that circulate, a very simple and profoundly moving story that made me think so much about marketing. I'm going to read it to you, and I think you'll find it just as moving as I did.

So here's the story:

There once was a farmer who had two buckets. He used those buckets to bring water home every day. One of the buckets had a crack and leaked continuously. The other was perfect and never spilled a drop. As time passed, the cracked bucket became sad about the leaked water. He decided to speak with the farmer. Upon learning that he was sad, the farmer asked the bucket to join him on a walk. They walked down the same path as always, but this time the farmer pointed out all of the wonderful life that had sprung up around them.

In the image, you see this beautiful path — green, green grass and all these different flowers along the path where the farmer walked with the bucket. And he explained to the bucket that he was responsible for all of this beauty. If he hadn't leaked water every day, the plants would never have grown. The bucket realized that despite his flaws, he still helped those around him grow even when he wasn't aware of it.

So that's the end of the story. It's very short. And I shared this to the Joyful Marketing Facebook group, and so many of my clients just loved this metaphor.

Where are your leaks?

And I wanted to challenge all of my clients — including you. I want to challenge you to think about where your leaks might be. What are the places where you might be leaking your bucket? And what kind of life you might be nourishing because of the places where you, quote-unquote, "leak"?

It's not that we can help people in spite of our flaws. It's that we help those around us because of our, quote-unquote, "flaws," right? In the path where the perfect bucket with zero leaks walked through over and over again, there were no plants. There were no flowers. It didn't nourish or nurture anything. But the leaky bucket — the path that it walked created all of this life in its path.

My leaky brain

So I started thinking about where this is true in my own life, and I'm definitely a bucket with lots of leaks. The first thing that I thought of is the fact that — you know, I share about this a lot — I have a brain that's very prone to a lot of anxiety and depression. The inside of my brain doesn't always look like what you might expect a life coach's brain to look like. It's not always positive. It's not always growth-oriented. A lot of the time I feel very tense. I feel very tightly wound. I feel very anxious. I feel very down. I feel very negative, for long stretches of time. I feel all the things that we think we're not supposed to feel — like shame and self-pity, and sometimes anger and annoyance, all of these things — because I have a brain that's very prone to anxiety and depression, and sometimes even addiction. And I used to think that's a flaw. That's an imperfection in me.

And when I look back, if that is the leak in my bucket, so to speak — I think if I didn't have a brain that did those things, I would've had no reason to sit with myself and experience myself in the dark moments of life. Imagine if I could always coach myself into feeling positive, always coach myself into growing, always into all the positive things — then I would've literally had no reason to spend lots of time in the darkness, lots of time in the discomfort and the pain and the awkwardness and the shamefulness. And if I hadn't spent a lot of time there, I think I would've never learned how to love myself in the middle of the darkness.

Think about it. If you don't have to feel like crap — if you can just snap your finger and feel amazing, if you could just automatically convert any challenge into a growth opportunity and be on top of everything — why would you ever need to learn how to love yourself in the darkness? How to be your own friend?

And I feel like I've had so much training in that. I'm not gonna say I'm perfect at it — not at all. I'm not at all perfect at it. But I've had a lot of practice. And it is directly from the practice I've had in my personal life — being with myself, not running away from myself, being willing to be present for myself and for my own life, being willing to be my own friend even when I look nothing like this ideal picture of a life coach — that, to me, is what defines me as a coach and defines how I want to serve the world. Because that's the work I want to do. I want to be there in other people's dark moments.

I want to serve as a guide of — when you're in the darkness, here's how you can be on your own side anyway. Here's how you can have genuine compassion for yourself. Here's how you can allow the darkness of life. And I think that comes through in so much of my teaching and coaching about business and marketing. Because when we sign up for business, so much of what we sign up for is really difficult emotional experiences — when things don't work out, when we fail, when we get rejected, when we get ignored. All of this will come up when you become a serious entrepreneur. And I like to think I do a pretty good job — at least I try to do a really good job — of modeling and teaching: here is how you don't abandon yourself in those moments. Here's how you stay your own friend. And I think I would've never known how to teach that if I didn't have tons and tons of experience myself. And I think that's the most important part of my work. So that's where that leak created that treasure for me.

The one who can't follow the plan

And if I think about other leaks of mine, there are so many. Another big one is that I'm really bad at sticking with plans, following instructions, doing as I'm told. If there's a curriculum I have to follow and there are 10 parts to it, by the first two parts I'm already distracted and I've already lost interest. I want to go off and do something totally different. I just struggle to stay on track with things. It's part of my ADHD that I speak so much about.

And I was so ashamed of this way of being. It felt like a blemish. It felt like a leak in my bucket. If I'm so good at whatever — all the things we're supposed to be good at — why can't I just stay focused? Why can't I just stay on track? Why can't I follow through with a plan like a mature person is supposed to? These are all the thoughts I had to beat myself up with.

And now that I think about it, looking back — if it wasn't for the leakiness of my distractibility and the difficulty I have following plans, I think I would've never had to come up with my own ways of doing things, my own approaches, more creative workarounds. When people praise me for the originality of my ideas, the unique ways I think and I teach and I do business — none of that came about because I was really good at following instructions. Every single one of those things came about because I was first a disappointment to myself.

Probably almost everything I teach you in this podcast, everything I teach my clients in Joyful Marketing — probably the best parts of my teaching — they probably came from something I had to come up with, piece together, something I had to engineer on my own, because I could not make myself conform to somebody else's mold, no matter how badly I wished to.

I know from what people tell me all the time that watching me march to the beat of my own drum is so empowering and healing for people to watch. It gives them permission to do the same. It feels super refreshing to people, and they're so inspired by my example, and they also want to create more originality, more creativity in the way they do their businesses. And I wish I could say, oh yeah, that was my whole intention from the beginning, I planned it that way — but I didn't. In the beginning, I really wanted to be a good rule follower, because my whole life people told me that's what you have to be, and if you're not doing that, that's bad. So again — a flaw, a weakness that turned into a direct gift that nourishes the people around me.

Leaking my imperfect humanity

Another leakiness in my bucket, I think, is the difficulty I have being very polished and strategic. I leak my imperfect humanity all over the place. I'm a very flawed human, and I make mistakes all the time, and I make decisions that probably aren't the most strategically astute. And what has become apparent over time, which is so interesting, is that a lot of people wanted to hire me and learn from me because I was an example of having a thriving business without all of that perfection. They thought, oh, if Simone isn't super packaged and super polished and super on-message all the time, presenting as this perfect person, and she's making it work — maybe I can too. And I love it every single time a client of mine tells me they hired me because they saw me being human.

What flowers are you growing?

So I would love to pause here and ask you to consider: what are the things you're beating yourself up for because you're leaking? Who do you look up to as the example of — oh, look, that's a bucket that's perfect, it never leaks a drop of water? And how could it be true that whatever you think is perfect is also not nourishing vibrant life around them in the way that your bucket is nourishing all this life around you? What kind of flowers are you allowing to bloom because of your leaks? What kind of greenery?

It's such a beautiful metaphor. And you begin to know that it's not in spite of your imperfection, your flaws, that people around you are served. It's because of them. We are all here to be different role models. We're all here to be different types of leaders. And your leak — your particular, specific leaks — make you the unique leader that you are. So let us notice and give thanks to and celebrate the leaks in our buckets, and lean more deeply into our own humanity. Because who you are is already whole and perfect and perfectly worthy.

All right, my friends. I'll talk to you next week.