Since we’ve rebranded, a few of you have been wondering this and have asked how the tree became part of an image consulting company’s logo. Luckily, I have this blog and can tell you the secret tale of what I like to call “treedom”. When my awesome integrated marketing specialist (Allison Cousins of REX Image – woot!) was taking me through her unique brand discovery process, I did a large chunk of exploratory work, figuring out what ICU’s values were, what the brand represented and how that might best be expressed. I changed my mind a lot, as the company was fairly new and hadn’t undergone this type of analysis before. Essentially, we reached the point where we were both a bit stuck. Finally she asked me about some of my inspirations and I shared a very personal story about how I wrote a little kids’ book when I started my own development, way back when.

There is a poet in San Francisco, Mary Mackey, who wrote a poem with a line that I’ve never forgotten: “I grew in rings, like a tree. At the center I’m always 10, with pink glasses and braces.” I really identified with this idea of growing as a tree and so I got doodling one day with crayons (I love crayons, I always have) in a little sketchbook and came up with the story “The Katherine Tree”.

I described what it was like under the tree (warm all the time), what the tree did (tickling your ear with treesongs, truesongs) and how it bloomed (hothouse flowers of joy), and added pictures for each page. At the end, I wrote ‘Where is your tree?’ to accompany the last page, with a small seedling sprouting, and this came to represent that developmental journey, the process of ‘uncovering’ or ‘treedom’.

Each of us starts as a little seedling full of potential and when we grow older and begin to rediscover ourselves, we sometimes need to get back to the core of who we really are, as if we were looking under the layers to the heart of a tree.

I think who you are at four is who you are at seventy-four. It’s important to uncover the essence of you and then regrow and blossom into who you were meant to be. At ICU I am lucky – I help people grow.  What inspires you? Are you living your best life? In short…………………………………………………………………………………………..