Grounded

I recently purchased a set of vortex cards and have taken to shuffling the deck each morning and choosing one card to guide my day. This morning, Earth I jumped out of the deck.

Again.

I’ve drawn it several times in the past few weeks, so there’s something in this message I still haven’t fully taken to heart.

Its message: “The Earth takes care of me, recognising I am an essential part of it. I ground myself deeply into it, knowing that only trees with deep roots can reach their branches up to the heavens.”

Here’s what I’ve come to realise:  the more successful we become, the further we tend to drift from our roots. We build careers on being always on, always moving, always reachable. We treat groundedness as a nice-to-have for a beach holiday, not a daily requirement. And then we wonder why we feel depleted, reactive, and strangely disconnected from the very purpose that got us here.

There’s a physical dimension to this, of course. The surface of the earth carries a negative charge. When we walk barefoot on grass or sand, those electrons help neutralise the free radicals our bodies generate simply by living — eating, breathing, existing. Grounding isn’t a wellness trend. It’s biology. And most of us access it once a year, if that, on a holiday we spend checking email anyway.

This morning I’m about to head down and make breakfast. Berries from the fridge, a muesli base of wheat, rye and barley, nuts, seeds, raisins, authentic Greek yoghurt imported from Greece, almond milk from California, a peach from the Mediterranean from yet another plastic tub.

Usually I throw it together in under two minutes without a single thought for what it took to get here . The intensive farming, the chemical fertilisers, the air miles, the oil behind the plastic tub. I recycle what I can. The rest joins a landfill or an ocean somewhere. I grew up in a world where berries came in cardboard and groceries went home in paper. That world didn’t ask this much of the earth. Ours does, every single day, through thousands of small decisions none of us pause to examine.

This is exactly the pattern I see in the leaders I work with. Not carelessness . Just velocity. You move so fast, and carry so much, that you stop noticing what you’re drawing on to keep going, and what you’re leaving behind as you do. Your energy, your team’s goodwill, your own sense of what actually matters to you. These get consumed the same way my breakfast consumes the earth’s resources. Quietly. Constantly. Without a second thought.

So here’s my prescription, for myself as much as for you. Somewhere in your day, put your bare feet on real ground. Not as a holiday indulgence, but as a discipline. While you’re there, ask yourself what you’ve been consuming lately without noticing — of your own energy, your relationships, your sense of purpose — and what it would take to actually replenish it, rather than just push through.

I’m off to dance barefoot on the grass. Join me, even if it’s just for five minutes before your first meeting.