Who waters the forest?

Who hasn’t struggled to keep a houseplant alive despite a fantastic vase, the ‘best’ soil, and special fertiliser? We can’t keep a single plant alive, yet millions of acres of forests and animals thrive without us. They actually do best without us. Let that sink in.

I came across the question “who waters the forest” in Michael Singer’s work recently, it struck a chord and I want to share my own lens on it. Forests are zones of extreme complexity, intricate interdependencies, and delicate balance. Awe-inspiring when you think about all the stories and lives woven into those zones, yet it is also profoundly simple when you realise the forest grows simply because the conditions in that location support that type of life. If the conditions were not right, no forest would exist.

Next, consider the grass in Dubai. It is perfect and lush, but only while constant irrigation and power keep it alive. Switch off the infrastructure and it dies. Grass requires infrastructure. When you fight nature it requires constant energy and effort to maintain, and you are only buying time. Such is the power of nature.

In your life you have both areas inside you: areas that support life naturally, and areas you keep on life support, using your own infrastructure and consuming your own energy to keep them alive. These are not physical places but emotional and energetic ones, yet as real as the love you know for your family or your partner.

Personal development is a vast field, and every metaphor offers its own wisdom and angle of exploration. It is a multi-dimensional space, so words cannot touch more than slices of it. Today I suggest personal development is the practice of recognising what carries its own energy in your life, choosing to cultivate more of that, and making peace with unplugging what only survives on life support. In that choice you reclaim energy, ease, and possibility.

🎯 Forests remind us that lush growth is never forced. It happens because the conditions are right, and life takes care of the rest. This causes us to let go, pay attention and work with life.

Outcomes follow conditions

Maybe I have sparked your interest, but how do you move out of theory and into practice? You do not need more thinking. You already over-consume. What you need is more feeling and more experiencing. You are a thought-addict.

The tools are simple, yet most people will not engage. There are only two tools: self-reflection and conversation. In truth, even conversation simply facilitates self-reflection in ways not possible on your own. Through the right lens you can look at the conditions you have created, see what can be cultivated, and what needs to wither.

A useful starting point is to map your emotions. There are many ways I help clients do this, as varied as the individual. The reason this is key is that what feels negative often signals energy that is buried or confused. Shame and doubt behave like the grass in Dubai, constantly consuming attention and pulling away energy.

Joy, ease, and grace point in the opposite direction, showing you where conditions already support your forest. Where more is possible. Understanding the intelligence within emotions is like learning to navigate by the stars. What once felt uncomfortable or foreign can become a guiding system.

🎯 We keep trying to think our way forward while ignoring the emotional signals that show us where life is draining and where it naturally wants to grow.

The cost of life support

What you keep alive through force eventually drains you. The rolling green grass in Dubai drains energy, water, labour, infrastructure. The longer you hold on, the more energy is pulled away from places where life could thrive. Fears, doubts, and insecurities are not failures, they are energy trapped in systems that cannot sustain growth. Each one consumes something from you in order to maintain.

You might insist you do not want them, yet you are the one still holding on and keeping them alive. Letting go is not abstract. It is exactly that: putting something down. When it is released, your system reorganises, energy flows again, and life finds its path like a blocked pipe finally cleared.

Change feels hard not because it is impossible but because it is unfamiliar. You were not taught by parents or culture how to do this work. It was lost hundreds and even thousands of years ago. Yet it is a language you can relearn quickly. What took forty years to clog up can take only a fraction of that to clean. Life is on your side.

A professional who clings to a job that no longer fits spends more energy surviving the week than creating a future. A leader disconnected from their own purpose shows up each day going through the motions, trying to keep the façade alive but no longer inspired by the role. The effort to maintain the mask drains energy that could be igniting new vision and inspiring those around them.

Life support always comes with an opportunity cost. The deadness of holding on can feel frightening, yet on the other side of release awaits vast, expansive joy and life.

🎯 Holding on drains the system. Letting go frees the energy to return, and what feels frightening at first opens into space for joy and renewal.

What real growth feels like

Growth that is aligned carries ease, even when it demands effort, yes I wrote that correctly. This is called inspiration, meaning in-spirit. There is clarity, presence, and a quiet joy that comes from moving with life rather than against it. Your body recognises it instantly. Time bends, ideas flow, and energy renews instead of drains.

When you enter this space it feels like tapping into a deeper intelligence that sees beyond the limits of the thinking mind (because that’s exactly what’s happening). Ideas arrive as if handed to you, and challenges that once seemed heavy take on new meaning. Progress is no longer about pushing harder but about clearing the blocks so momentum can reveal itself. I recall the moment I realised this, and began co-creating this way of being, things have been lighter, faster, richer, happier since, and accelerating exponentially.

The guiding light is simple and repeated by many teachers and books: take action in an area of passion without attachment to the outcome. Do it as fully as you can, as often as you can, as far as you can, as often as you can. Passion-led action feeds energy back into your system. The more you practise it, the more synchronicity shows up, the more aligned opportunities open, and the more life feels like it is carrying you rather than you carrying it.

A professional who follows curiosity into a project that excites them may find themselves energised after hours of work rather than depleted. A leader who reorients their strategy around what truly matters often sees their team not only deliver more but come alive in the process. Many paths lead out of current roles, realities, paradigms and into new unexplored territory. Trust the feeling, trust life and yourself, and relax the grip your mind has on needing to know or thinking it knows.

🎯 Growth unfolds when you act from passion without clinging to results. Each step feeds momentum until life itself begins to move you forward.

Learning from the forest

The forest never needs watering shows you that growth is inevitable, natural, the default state. It happens because the conditions are right. Your task is not to force results but to curate the conditions that allow life to renew itself. Peace, ease, freedom, connection and similiar.

Cultivating your own forest begins with embodiment practices. Presence, mindfulness, and emotional awareness steady your system so you can see clearly where energy flows and where it is leaking. Shadow work then brings transformation at the roots, revealing the parts of you that have been hidden, carrying wounds, or caught in old stories. When these are brought into the light, energy that was once trapped becomes available again.

Beyond this lies the expansive work of self-actualisation. Here you reconnect with the larger field of identity, purpose, and possibility that has always been present beneath the noise. Inspired ideas emerge, a bigger picture comes into view, and life begins to move with you.

These are the areas I specialise in with professionals and leaders.

When you align in this way, life starts to bloom. You reclaim energy, ease, and the capacity for exponential change. The path forward is not about building harder or forcing outcomes. It is about aligning more closely with what already wants to grow and allowing life to reveal its natural rhythm.

🎯 When you nurture the right conditions within, life will do the rest. Once you really understand this, you’ll begin to recognise it in all the great stories.

💡 Mike McGregor | Transformational Coach: Evidence-Based Transformational Coaching for Leaders & Professionals

If it’s time for change, I can help you work out your next move. Book a Free Insight Session.