Have you ever snapped at your child after a stressful work call, only to immediately wish you could take it back? Or entered an important meeting still carrying the emotional weight from a morning argument with your spouse?

We all have moments when we leave our centered state—when patience dissolves, perspective narrows, and our best self temporarily vanishes. In these moments, we're most vulnerable to doing things we later regret.

But what if there was a simple visual metaphor that could transform how you navigate these inevitable departures from your center? A tool that offers not just awareness, but compassion for your very human journey?

The Flower Within

For me, being centered feels like a state of peace and patience. When I inhabit this space, I make better decisions, act with greater integrity, do my best work, and express love more generously. But I can't always remain there—none of us can.

Just this week, while living in Spain, we had a gas leak in our flat that left us without hot water for several days. Frustrating, but manageable. We scheduled contractors to fix it Monday morning after dropping the kids at the bus.

When we returned home with the contractors, ready to finally resolve the issue, we discovered we had locked ourselves out. Both my wife Jen and I had forgotten our keys. The contractors couldn't enter. I couldn't get to my home office to work. We were letting other people down because of our mistake.

Peace and patience weren't exactly my dominant emotions in that moment.

The Problem with Perfection

I coach a lot of ambitious parents juggling professional demands alongside family leadership. One of the biggest struggles I witness is the harsh self-judgment and criticism that follows these inevitable departures from centeredness.

We say things we regret. We respond impatiently to our children. We enter an important meeting carrying the residual stress from a difficult client call. Then we pile on with internal criticism: "I can't believe I did that again." "Why can't I keep it together?" "What's wrong with me?"

Over time, this self-flagellation creates a sense of defeat. We start to think maybe this centered state is simply unattainable given the complexities of our lives. So we stop trying.

But what if we're asking the wrong thing of ourselves?

The Daisy Flower

Let me offer a different way to think about this challenge—a simple image I often sketch on the back of a napkin during coaching sessions: a daisy flower.

Imagine the center of the daisy represents your grounded state—the place of patience, peace, and presence that you aspire to maintain. Throughout your day, you'll inevitably encounter situations that pull you away from this center. These are the petals of the daisy.

A difficult conversation with your teenager. An unexpected crisis at work. Even small disruptions like spilled coffee or a missed appointment. Each creates a petal—a temporary departure from your center.

The key insight is this: instead of expecting yourself to remain perpetually centered (a flower with no petals), focus instead on the shape of your petals. How quickly do you return to center?

Most of us, left unaware, develop very long petals. We get triggered and stay in that reactive state for hours or even days. The bigger the challenge, the longer the petal extends before eventually curving back to center.

We can't control all the events in our lives, but we can absolutely influence how our petals look—how quickly we recognize our departure from center and find our way back.

The longer our petals extend, the more vulnerable we become to actions we'll later regret. Each moment spent away from center increases the probability of words we can't take back, decisions made from reaction rather than wisdom, opportunities missed because we were too caught in our emotional weather to see clearly.

Conversely, when we develop the capacity to return to center more quickly, we spend more time in a harmonious state where we're not only less likely to cause harm, but more effective in our actions and more available to experience joy.

Drawing Your Flower

With many of my clients, I ask them to literally draw their daisy at the end of the day. They reflect on moments that pulled them from center and sketch petals that represent how long they stayed away.

Some days the flower looks quite ragged, with long, uneven petals stretching far from center. Other days, the petals are shorter and more uniform. Either way, the exercise creates awareness about our emotional patterns without judgment.

You can draw these flowers for different time horizons—a day, an hour, even a single challenging experience. The visualization helps make abstract emotional processes more concrete and manageable.

I've found this approach offers a much more compassionate way of viewing ourselves as we navigate difficult moments. It acknowledges our humanity while still encouraging growth.

Shortening Your Petals

So how do we develop shorter petals? How do we return to center more quickly after inevitably being pulled away? Here are three strategies that have transformed my own life and the lives of those I coach:

1. Decorate Your Life with Reminders

Our environments shape our awareness. By strategically placing visual cues along the main thoroughfares of your daily life, you create multiple opportunities to remember your commitment to returning to center.

I have small reminders everywhere—a Post-it note on my bathroom mirror, a symbol on my coffee maker, a small stone on my desk. Each serves as a pattern interrupt, a moment of potential awareness that asks: "Where are you right now? Are you in your center or have you drifted into a petal?"

Pay special attention to transition moments—those natural thresholds in your day when you move from one context to another. I used to keep a heart-shaped stone at the end of my driveway. Each evening when returning from work, I would see it and use that moment as a cue to consciously shed the day's stresses before entering my home.

These transition rituals—a few intentional breaths before entering an important meeting, a moment of stillness in your car before picking up your children, a deliberate pause before responding to a challenging email—create natural opportunities to return to center before engaging with what's next.

These environmental cues don't need to be elaborate or even noticeable to others. They simply need to speak to you, to whisper an invitation back to presence when you've drifted away.

Better awareness inevitably leads to better choices. Without awareness, we can spend hours or even days in a reactive petal state without even recognizing it.

2. Structural Discipline

While spontaneous returns to center are beautiful, I've found that establishing consistent rhythms of reset throughout my day creates a foundation of centeredness that makes longer departures less likely.

For me, these include non-negotiable morning time at the gym, a contemplative walk after dropping the kids at school, and twenty minutes of reading with coffee in the mid-afternoon. These aren't just pleasant activities—they're intentional reset points that bring me back to center regardless of what the day has thrown my way.

The specific practices matter less than their consistency. What matters is creating regular opportunities to shed the accumulating stress and reactivity before they extend your petals too far from center.

3. Change What You Consume

We're meticulous about our food diet, yet often careless about our information and conversation diet. Yet what we consume mentally and emotionally affects our ability to stay centered just as profoundly as what we consume physically.

Our world is saturated with content designed to trigger reactivity—news headlines crafted to provoke anxiety, social media algorithms that reward outrage, and conversations that revolve around problems beyond our control. Each of these pulls us from our center, often without our awareness.

I've become increasingly intentional about what I allow into my mental and emotional space. I limit news consumption to specific times rather than constant background noise. I've curated my social media to include voices that inspire centeredness rather than reactivity. I seek out conversations that expand perspective rather than narrow it.

This doesn't mean avoiding difficult realities or living in a bubble. It means approaching information with intentionality rather than passivity. It means asking: "Does consuming this help me stay grounded and effective, or does it pull me into extended petals with no productive outcome?"

The company we keep shapes us too. When we surround ourselves with people who have mastered the art of returning to center quickly, we absorb their patterns. When we immerse ourselves in communities that value reactivity, we internalize those patterns instead.

By consciously shaping what we consume, we create an internal environment more conducive to centeredness, one that naturally supports shorter petals and quicker returns to our grounded state.

A Different Kind of Perfection

The beauty of the daisy metaphor is that it redefines what success looks like. Perfection isn't the absence of petals—a centeredness so complete that nothing ever disturbs it. Such a flower wouldn't even be a flower at all.

Instead, success becomes the development of a more beautiful, balanced daisy—one whose petals extend when necessary but return to center with increasing efficiency and grace.

We are human. We will leave center. The question isn't whether this will happen, but what shape our flower will take as a result.

When I was sitting in the café next door to my flat, waiting for the locksmith after being locked out, I asked myself, "What shape do I want my flower to be today?" This simple question helped me recognize my departure from center and choose to return more quickly rather than letting the frustration color my entire morning.

Today, I invite you to draw your daisy. Look at its shape with curiosity rather than criticism. Notice which petals extended furthest and what might help you return to center more quickly next time.

In doing so, you'll discover not just a more compassionate relationship with yourself, but also a practical path to showing up as the parent, partner, and professional you aspire to be—not because you never leave center, but because you've mastered the art of coming home.