The Work

Why Landscaping Taught Me More About Coaching Than Any Course Could

Written by Dave South

I love talking about work.

Especially the years I spent running teams of young men on landscaping sites, in the trenches with them, doing the physical stuff.

There's a particular kind of camaraderie that comes out of that.

Construction sites are intimidating places, genuinely high risk, and when you're working the land shoulder to shoulder with someone, you need to have each other's back.

That builds a level of respect you don't get from a classroom. 

The heart of it was always this. The harder the project, the more the team galvanised.

You'd watch blokes' confidence grow in real time, right in front of you, as they took on a challenge and came out the other side of it.

Landscaping is the icing on the cake after all the foundation work is done, and I'd tell the young men on my crew, look at what we're building here. It's going to grow and mature, same as you are.

Putting a plant in the ground with real intention, giving it a home, there's something in that tactile, hands in the dirt work that talking never replicates. 

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Part of my story is that my landscaping business eventually collapsed.

Looking back at that period, I'd won awards, I was doing high end design work, everything I'd pictured for myself on paper. But a lot of what was driving me was ego. Always chasing better, never stopping to actually appreciate the work in front of me. 

What did stay with me, through all of that, were the young men.

Watching them grow in confidence every time they jumped on a machine and put in a few more hours.

Those little light bulb moments.

Looking back now, I can see my real purpose was always to coach and to teach. These days that's young men specifically, because that's who I can speak to authentically, and who I feel I can help the most. 

I eventually realised that a big part of why I started that business in the first place was to build a team around me and pass on a craft.

To show blokes what they were capable of if they focused, put in the hard work, and had the discipline to show up consistently.

I could design a beautiful landscape entirely in my head. But if I didn't show up and do the work, on time and on budget, the vision meant nothing.

That became a bit of a philosophy for me, on site and off it.

You can design your life in your head all you like. Without the discipline to show up and tie off the loose ends, that design stays just that, a picture that never gets built. 

There's a lot of talk these days about what young men need and what they're lacking.

Plenty of opinion, plenty of conversation about the problem.

But talking about it doesn't change it.

Turning up and doing physical work does. It proves to a young man that he's capable of more than he thinks, and when he does that consistently, his confidence rises.

He starts trusting the decisions he's making, especially on site where the work is genuinely dangerous, and that trust spreads into every other decision he makes. 

What I'm finding is that young men are begging for the chance to be shown how to do hard work and get through a real day of it.

Put the phone away, put in the hours, and the results after even one day are remarkable.

That's the work building trust in themselves, trusting their own instincts, and learning that mistakes aren't failure, they're just another chance to find out who they really are. 

This is why The Work and The Land are two of our seven pillars. 

Not because they sounded good on paper, but because I lived them first, in the trenches, with a crew of young men who taught me as much as I ever taught them.