We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jen Lagedrost Cavender a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Jen thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
To be successful takes motivation, devotion, self-awareness, and a commitment to being curious.
Before we go into each of these, I just want to note that success is a subjective experience; it is different for each person, and it is helpful to define what success is for yourself many times throughout your career as you evolve. Success is also an experience, not a point of arrival. This means it’s useful to frame pursuing success with the awareness that we feel it in certain bright moments, especially upon reflection, but that we continue to seek it as we achieve and move beyond stages that were once our farthest goals. Let’s look a little closer at the four things I mentioned:
Success takes motivation — Motivation is the intrinsic drive to do something, that genuine desire and thrill or spark of passion that ignites something inside you. It feels like the crossroads of possibility and capability. Motivation is what gets us going, and it’s what keeps us taking steps; it’s the “why” behind everything we do. I had a professor in college who told me that “your thesis should be something you would climb walls for.” She meant, of course, that you better like and care about your thesis topic so much that you would be willing, if not thrilled, to do immensely challenging things for it. When I started Nectar & Bloom, I was ready to climb walls. I was finishing my last two semesters of teaching English at the University of San Diego, and I had fallen in love with floral design, along with the possibility that an English major with an MFA in Creative Writing, such as myself, could pivot and leverage all of her experiences to open a floral design studio on her own. I hadn’t seen this chapter coming, and I was ardently in love. The work I put in for the initial startup was demanding and consuming, but in some ways it felt effortless. I knew why I wanted to create this for myself, why I wanted to contribute beauty and inspiration to the world through the language of flowers, and why I wanted to craft my own business that would enable me to someday teach and empower others how to create their dreams too.
Success takes devotion — Devotion is where dedication meets real care and respect for what you are doing (or need to do) in order to move toward your goals. Devotion is stronger than diligence, or simply the commitment to check off boxes, because devotion is emotional. If you are devoted to attaining your vision for success, you take the steps you need to with an awareness of a bigger picture and a sense of higher calling. You bring your heart to what you do. If I didn’t love creating transformative experiences for people through floral artistry, or through workshops and courses, if my brand wasn’t aligned with my core values of inspiration and empowerment, that deep connection and drive would not be there. Get to know what matters to you deeply in your work and service in the world, and align with that. Your devotion to building and sustaining it will flow freely when you do.
Success takes self-awareness — Self-awareness is the continuous effort to learn about and become ever more conscious of who and how you are. This, more deeply, is a study of who and how we all are, and of what it means to be alive and contributing to all of life around you. I truly believe that a willingness to know ourselves, to pursue seeing ourselves more fully and integrating all parts of ourselves, we are able to come to compassion, perspective, and genuine connection with others. I am a devoted journaler. I write 3 pages every day in a journal as a ritual of reflection, processing, and documentation. Just giving myself space to see and hear where I am right now brings immense clarity and guidance to what I do. Instead of operating at break-neck speed just “doing-doing-doing,” this kind of reflective practice of “being” is incredibly helpful in knowing your strengths and weaknesses, knowing what success actually is to you, and becoming aware of what is holding you back, what you need to heal, as well as how most genuinely you are here to create and serve. As mentioned, we are always growing and evolving, and bringing awareness to that human experience brings so much light and direction (not to mention often solutions to problems or great ideas) to the surface for you to access and share.
Success takes a commitment to being curious — Curiosity is an incredible frame of mind. It is simple and available to us in any given moment. Becoming curious about any situation also suddenly opens up options. One of the best books I’ve read in the past 10 years or so (and I read a lot of books!), was “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.” It has a clunky title, and it may not spring off the shelf for you if you’re not into the leadership sector, but it has universally applicable and empowering concepts in it that will change your life. One of the core points is about the power of getting curious and how it can flip your frame of mind instantly from feeling closed, defensive, and needing to be right to feeling open, interested, and willing to learn. It is a tool that has freed me from many, many situations that seemed at first blush like dead ends, but that became an instructive and interesting opportunity with that simple mindset shift. This is so essential for entrepreneurs and small business owners, in particular! But I also think it’s essential for all human beings in all industries and relationships. Give it some thought, and see how it feels for you when you try it.
Jen, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I came to floristry through an interesting and unexpected culmination of experiences that make sense in retrospect but that were not planned (and I am definitely a planner). I grew up on an organic produce farm, where my sister and I ran our own little business growing cutting flowers and selling hand-gathered bouquets at our parents’ farmers market stand each summer of my childhood. When I moved to California to pursue my BA in English & Writing and eventually my MFA in Creative Writing & Poetry, I dove into a career chapter in academia as a writer and professor that felt thrilling and aligned. Never once did I think flowers or anything from my childhood experience would appear in my future career path. What I have learned since then is that life comes full circle, sometimes many times in one life; and, during our continuous expansion and evolution while we are here, we often find ourselves returning “home” again.
A few years into my work in academia as a professor of English & writing, I pivoted, and started my floral design studio Nectar & Bloom. This was soon after my husband and I planned our wedding, which was an experience that exposed me to the creative entrepreneurial sector and the events industry. This, in a lot of ways, was exactly what I’d been seeking. While I loved my students and loved the rigors of academia, I had been craving a career shift that would allow me to be my own boss, to work as an artist in a reliable market, and to join other creatives on larger projects to create incredible experiences that were bigger than any one company could generate alone.
From there I quickly grew Nectar & Bloom into a brand devoted to offering floral artistry education and experiences that are integrated with holistic wellbeing practices. As a yoga teacher and student of Ayurveda and Reiki, among other healing modalities, it felt imperative to me to integrate wellbeing and holistic sustainability into my work and teachings in floristry.
Nectar & Bloom now offers holistic online courses in floral artistry for beginners and seasoned professionals alike, in-person mentorships for floral designers through immersive private workshop experiences, in-studio and destination group workshops, and design services for brand partnerships, activations, and selective events.
Nectar & Bloom is in the midst of a renaissance at the moment too, as we grow further into our mission to support floral artists through transformative education and experiences. I will soon be releasing a Tarot of Flowers deck I’ve created that is based on the metaphoric wisdom of flowers and illustrated by my talented sister (the same one beside whom I grew up growing flowers). This is a super meaningful project that we are thrilled to be able to share soon. Nectar & Bloom is also developing creativity & wellbeing retreat experiences, a podcast, and other exciting new offerings and experiences in the works.
Evolving as a brand in ever more authentic and integrated ways (for me, bringing together my passions for nature, art, writing, sustainability, and holistic healing and wellbeing) has been key to my business’s growth as well as the growing success and fulfillment that it generates.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
Absolutely! Here are a few of the most impactful and influential books I’ve read lately that have deeply informed and inspired aspects of my entrepreneurial and relational philosophies:
• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, by Chapman, Dethmer, & Klemp
• We Should All Be Millionaires, by Rachel Rogers
• Obsessed: Building a Brand People Love From Day One, by Emily Heyward
• The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron
• Rest is Resistance, by Tricia Hersey
• The Big Leap, by Gay Hendricks
PS: A Nectar & Bloom Book Club is in the works. Stay tuned!
How did you build your audience on social media?
When I started Nectar & Bloom, I began sharing on social media in hopes of building connection. I started to build particularly on Instagram because it is such a visual platform, and because flowers are nothing short of dazzling to the eye (among other senses). I’ve grown my community there organically since the beginning, and it has been an amazing experience finding friends, collaborators, and fellow floral artists and enthusiasts there from all over the world through building that space.
Early on, I would simply post my latest floral arrangement from my design practice, and often I would write a bit of poetry in response to the design as a caption, purely because as a poet I was inspired to. As a bit of backstory, there is a form of poetry called “ekphrasis” or “ekphrastic poetry,” a form that responds directly to or interacts with a physical art form, artifact, or object. Ekphrastic poets have written in response to sculptures, abstract paintings, and many other tangible art forms. As a person who experiences Synesthesia (the experience of more than one sense simultaneously, such as hearing color or seeing sound), I’ve always been naturally drawn to this visceral type of poetry, and when I started designing with flowers, I intuitively applied it to what I was seeing (hearing, feeling, and sometimes tasting too) when writing in response to flowers.
I think because I was doing something purely authentic in writing ekphrastic verse to accompany my floral arrangements, something imbued with the combined sparks of multiple passions, people really took to it. They saw and felt something. They connected, and they followed along. As a writer, I found that connecting with my audience through my writing was important to me and to them, both through the poetry and through my own thoughts and bits of guidance I’ve gathered along my journey. Flowers are a language and with them we tell stories in color, texture, scent, and gesture. Flowers are their own kind of poetry, and composing with them inspires all kinds of resonance and connections.
Now, to pull from this story a few bits of advice for anyone just starting to build a presence or audience on social media, here are my top tips:
1. Share your process. It doesn’t have to be perfect. People appreciate and feel empowered by seeing behind the scenes and the steps that generate a larger experience or product.
2. Be intentional. Take your photos in good, natural light, and pay attention to the lines and composition of the shot. People can feel intentionality in photographs.
3. Connect authentically as yourself. Share in a way that is true to your values, your passions, and the way you see the world. This is always more relatable and more real.
4. Honor the many chapters of life you’ve had that inform your work now, and allow that to be part of your presence and service. Have fun with sharing on social media too — the energy you put into it will inform the energy you receive from it.
5. Choose a social media platform that suits your industry.
6. Instead of thinking about building a following, think about building community. Create a home for your brand and for the audience you want to reach, and host them there genuinely. Social media is only one piece of business, and I think it works best as a tool for connection and building a brand experience.
7. Use social media to build a brand experience with connection and presence more than pushing or expecting sales. Cultivate an audience who loves and gains a lot from the content you share over time, and you will create brand fans and devoted advocates for your brand.
8. Remember that social media is only one channel and one aspect of a business. It’s also “borrowed real estate,” so to speak. Make sure you invite your audience to join your email list or contact you through your own website, which is real estate you do own.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.nectarandbloomfloral.com
- Instagram: @nectar_and_bloom
- Facebook: Nectar & Bloom
- Pinterest: @nectarandbloom
Image Credits
Vanessa Rose Photography vanessarosephoto.com @hellovanessarose