In today’s world of competing ideas, one unique healing and relaxation process arises – the flower remedy. Using the natural bloom, essence, and aroma of these elegant plants, emotional and psychological treatments are provided in an interesting way. Delving into this industry with Melanie Parish is the Creator of LOTUSWEI, Katie Hess. Katie shares the benefits of their available products, the leadership style that keeps her team working together, and why she welcomes skepticism with all her heart. To understand the art of flower remedy even more, Melanie takes Katie’s online flower quiz, helping the host understand how the plants she chose mirrors her personality and can help elevate her.

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Unlocking The Power Of Flower Remedy With Katie Hess

I’ve been thinking about my leadership and I’ve been thinking about how experts help me be a better leader. I’ve been in conversations with lawyers and accountants and it’s been fascinating to learn how I can scale up quickly. Sometimes I become the biggest bottleneck in my business, in my life because I don’t know something and I can flounder for a long time or I can ask an expert. It’s amazing how things shift and how I’m able to move forward if I get expert advice. I get onto a solid foundation again. It’s fantastic to have a big network of people. You can ask any question, it gives you deep reserves as a leader and I’m noticing how much I appreciate good advice in my leadership.

I’m here with Katie Hess and she’s a flower alchemist, author of Flower Evolution and Founder of LOTUSWEI, one of the world’s leading floral apothecaries. With her signature elixirs featured in the Oprah Magazine, The New York Times and The LA Times, her flower-powered community is thriving in over fifteen countries. With seventeen years of independent research of flower and plant-based healing, Katie is a pioneer in her field. It’s her life’s work to intuit which flowers to unearth at the right time to unlock the qualities we most need. I’m so excited to have Katie on my show.

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Katie, I’m super excited to have you on my show.

Melanie, I’m happy to be here.

I am curious about many things about your business and you as a leader but I want to dive in and ask you what you’re working on now as a business owner and leader.

It’s always the constant redefinition process. We’re working on education programs, focusing on creating a beautiful army of educators around the world and looking for ways to expand our reach into more of Asia.

That’s super interesting. I am curious, how are you choosing who you work with? You’re hiring educators around the world. What do you think about as you hire those people?

We’re looking to pair up with existing acupuncturists, functional medicine doctors, people who are good at their craft but they are interested in adding another little element of natural medicine to their lineup. The way we’re doing it is the way we’ve always done it, which is to see who is attracted to us because it’s never worked in my history. It’s never worked for me to go out and look for people. I get clear on what it is that we want. We wait for people to show up.

How do you let them know whether they’re attracted to you? You have to run across them. How do you make yourself available to them?

We do a lot of marketing. We do events. We do a lot of social media. We do outreach. There’s a ton of word of mouth. We got a membership at NCCAOM. It’s the national acupuncture board. We’re reaching out to all of these different organizations that work with chiropractors and massage therapists who need continuing education units. We’re approaching it from the education realm, where people need to complete a certain amount of classes to stay in their profession. We can enhance what people are already doing and what they’re already good at as a way to grow this world of flower remedies.

Flower Remedy: You’ll always be drawn to those botanicals that are going to benefit you most at the moment.

How long have you been around, for several years? Is that right?

It’s many years.

I feel I’ve seen it all or something now and yet everything is new. What’s it like for you to be many years in?

It’s a settled feeling of finally realizing that I truly can do whatever I want and be successful. The best way is not to look at what other people are doing and follow or do what I think I’m supposed to do. I think maybe what I should do. Whatever brings me joy and excitement and whatever excites my team is what we should do even if it’s something that seems outlandish or wild.

Speaking of outlandish and wild, I’m a little skeptical of the idea of flower essences. You encouraged me to share that. I would love to know what you would say to someone who’s both curious and also, “What’s this thing that I am not familiar with?”

I love skeptics. Healthy skepticism is critical thinking. It’s a skill that has gone by the wayside these days. I love skeptics. We should question things. There’s a lot of snake oil out there. We can’t believe everything that everyone tells us, not everyone has the best of intentions. What I usually say is at least in terms of flower remedies and curiosity, there are certain things that we know from our personal experience that no one could tell us. Otherwise, if someone were to say, “How do you feel after a two-hour hike in the woods?” You feel great. Something’s different, maybe it’s the oxygen, maybe there’s something more to it. You feel amazing. You could say, “If you sit and imagine yourself in a field of daisies, how does that make you feel?” You need to take note of that.

If I were in an ancient, quiet redwood forest, how would that make me feel? You need to take note of that. If I were in a garden of luxurious roses of every color, how does that make me feel? What we come to notice is that innately, we have this wisdom about us that we do speak the language of flowers without knowing it. We know that different flowers and botanicals make us feel differently. People don’t necessarily get twelve long-stem red roses for their moms on Mother’s Day. There are certain flowers that people don’t give their lovers for Valentine’s Day either. We know these things inherently. I like to look at inner wisdom and trying things for myself.

If someone were curious, can a flower help me sleep better at night or make me more focused on my business? I say like, “Try it.” Especially in the world of flower remedies with herbs and essential oils sometimes you have to be careful. With flower essences, there are no negative side effects. There are no contraindications. It’s super gentle, even babies and pregnant moms can take them. There’s nothing to lose in trying it for yourself versus listening to someone else. The skeptics of the world, we want to know for ourselves. We can’t argue. No one can argue with what my experience is. That’s usually the angle I take with it.

I don’t know how I would experiment. I’ve had practitioners tell me a flower essence might be something that I wanted to try. How would I experiment? The show’s all about experimenting. How would I experiment for myself with flower remedies?

You can always trust your senses. What we have found over the last many years is that you’ll always be drawn to those botanicals that are going to benefit you most at the moment. All of us have stress, some form of static. We’ve got all these invisible waves traveling through space around us throwing us off. There’s always something going on with us as humans. Look at what things you’re attracted to. It’s as simple as like on our website we have a quiz and you see which flowers you’re drawn to. Based on what you’re drawn to, that points in the direction of where to start. You could take an elixir. An elixir is a glass bottle of water, honey, alcohol and flower remedies themselves. This is something that’s been around for thousands of years but traditionally, the doctors and alchemists as a community would tell people to go out into the wild. They would say like, “Melanie, you’ve told me everything that’s going on in your life. Based on what you’ve told me, I’m going to tell you to look for this flower. Every morning you’ve got to go out there and drink the dew off the top of the flower.” That would be here therapy. It’s not practical.

There is a way to bottle the particular healing qualities of these flowers. You try it. You put it in your coffee, water, tea and you drink it throughout the day and you see what happens. You see, “Do I feel a difference? Do I feel lighter? Am I laughing more? Do I feel more peaceful?” Human beings are super sensitive. If you have powerful remedies, you should feel a difference. I always tell people, “It’s not like you take a multivitamin and you’re like, ‘I don’t know, is this helping me? I’m not sure.’” With flower remedies, you should feel a difference within a couple of days.

I might have to try, I might have to play a little. I’ll go to your website and check your flower quiz. I’d love to talk about your leadership of your organization. It’s been a crazy year. What are you thinking about as a leader now?

Our organization has undergone so many different changes and we’re in such a good place. You have many good leaders and looking at how do we expand with power, speed and agility but also maintaining the right team and people? How do we find good people, good heart, talented at what they do and grow our organization to the next level?

If you were talking to a new leader, what’s the hiring mistake that you’ve made or something that you’ve learned about hiring that you could share with somebody? What’s the advice you’d give a new leader around hiring?

There’s one thing that has worked for me well. I’ll share that as a tip. I do interviews with audio-only to start. I won’t do face-to-face Zoom. Typically, it’ll be a phone call. I don’t feel I need to present in a certain way to them. I can deeply listen to what they’re saying, every word and how they say it. I have a belief that how you do anything is how you do everything. When you’re listening to this person talk and express themselves, if there’s anything that you’re like, “That sounded off for some reason,” write it down. Write down all your first impressions and take those to heart because sometimes we second guess ourselves.

Sometimes we think, “This person has so many good qualifications, they’re amazing but there was this one little thing that struck me as odd when they said X, Y, Z.” You got to trust those little XYZs. You have to 500% trust yourself. We always have to give people the benefit of the doubt. If there’s a little red flag, don’t overrule that. Take that to heart because something that seems so little in an interview can be the root of a giant problem later.

Flower Remedy: Many good leaders pay so much attention to expanding power, speed, and agility, but maintaining the right team is also important.

I agree with you. There’s also good research around voice being a good way of when you’re trying to tell if somebody is lying, the voice is one of the best ways to tell. Doing an interview with a camera off is a great way to hone in on that little moment where it’s a half-truth or something that you might not notice with the visual field being more primary.

People’s personalities come out and you want it to. It’s like don’t sugarcoat anything, be your real, authentic self. Everybody has a glitch. It’s more like, “How do we get to that glitch quickly so we know if we’re a good fit or not?” We all want to be authentically a good fit.

That’s fit is incredibly important. I’ve had so many people talk themselves out of a job when I asked them about their dreams. What’s their highest dream for themselves and they tell me something completely unrelated to the job? I want you to have your dream. Go do that. Don’t be here. I like to ask people about imposter syndrome and I’m not asking you to share your deepest, darkest secrets. I would love to hear what you’ve learned over time for yourself, for other people, new leaders, people who are leading teams’ times grapple with imposter syndrome, especially women but not just women, everyone. What have you learned?

When I hear you say imposter syndrome, what comes to my mind is it wasn’t necessarily a doubt in myself, my qualities or what I was capable of. It was that fit thing. I wasn’t a good fit where I was. For example, when I first started making products because the first few years of my business, I was a therapist, seeing people one-on-one. When I was like, “I have to teach myself how to grow a business.” I spent a lot of time in the spa industry because it’s run by women. It’s a real holistic view of wellness and an amazing place and community to grow a business.

When I first got into the industry, I went to all these events where I was like, “I do not belong., I don’t wear high heels. I don’t go to the bar at night and get drunk to network. I don’t wear the right clothes. I don’t even go to the spa.” I remember one time saying, “I haven’t ever gotten a massage.” I was trying to sell flower essence products in the spa industry. I thought I didn’t belong. I can’t make it here because I don’t do the things or look the way that everyone else looks. I don’t do my nails, that kind of thing. I think back now and if I had allowed myself at that time of my business to do what was so fun for me, which was social media, YouTube videos. I would probably be a much bigger company because at that time, none of those things that ever taken off. If I had allowed myself to be myself and not feeling like an imposter in an industry that I didn’t fit in and go nuts in the areas that brought me joy, we would probably have a much bigger following now through social media than we do.

I am impressed that you have learned to listen as a leader. That’s the takeaway from your experience as a leader is to listen more deeply internally rather than trying to please some external measure.

It’s stark. Sometimes when you see the contrast, it’s not authentic. If I say that flower remedies are here to make us more authentically powerful and realize our true potential in life, I have to walk my talk. For me to be authentic in business, over the years it’s looked more like, “I wrote a book. We’re going to buy thousands of fresh flowers. We’re going to build massive flower mandalas on the floor, light hundreds of candles, put scents in the air, have edible flower food and blow people’s minds when they walk in the room.” Every time we would start to make our decisions more in that direction then things would start to cook and they would start to feel right. I always encourage new business owners to sink into what feels good to you truly. It’s so cliché, build it and they’ll come but know that there are people out there who will get jazzed by seeing you lit up. They’ll resonate with that and they’ll want the same thing.

How do you take care of yourself? What’s your self-care routine for yourself?

I meditate daily. I have been going to this physical therapy gym almost every day. I’m not a gym person at all but I had some lower back issues since I was sixteen. They’ve gotten progressively worse with so much sitting and computer work. In 2021, I put a lot of focus into keeping my physical body strong, doing strength training and trying to be more aware of drinking water and eating at the right times. I can’t tell you how many years in business that I’ve skipped lunches or not eating at the right time until the last few years we were like, “No, we can’t do that every day at lunch noon.” They seem such little things but they’re big things in the long-term. You would probably agree.

I can’t tell you it doesn’t happen often and that because I keep space in my schedule on purpose. Every now and then a week is crazy and I have back-to-back appointments from 9:00 until 4:00. It’s like, “When do I eat? When do I pee?” It becomes this funny and I find myself feeling selfish somehow that I want lunch. It’s ridiculous. In the joy of productivity, it happens. I have learned to say, “I know you’ve paid for an hour and I promise I’ll make it up to you but I’m going to need five minutes of your hour.” People are so generous and kind when you let them know your needs.

Everybody’s human. Everybody understands. Everybody’s lives are crazy.

Before we are doing this, I picked some flowers with Katie and she’s going to do a little mini reading for me and I’m hoping I’m going to get a care package of some kind in the mail. I’m super excited and I think you will be too to hear how Katie thinks about flowers. I took her quiz on her website and she’s doing this little reading for me, so I can’t wait, Katie.

Let me jump into it and you can let me know if you resonate or how much of it you resonate with. The first flower you picked is the fire-star orchid. It’s bright orange and yellow orchid. This is generally for people who are perpetually ahead of the curve, always creative, innovative but sometimes afraid. If you were in a boardroom, you might be a little bit tentative about sharing your ideas because you know that you have a habit to be way ahead of everybody else. It takes time for everyone to catch up to you. You may be a little bit tentative about sharing ideas. It helps you share fearlessly because we need that ahead of the curve.

I love the flirt, the idea of sharing fearlessly even if you’re ahead. I’ve been a business coach for so long, I can see what’s going to happen a few years ahead. My little fish and chip shops rebrand and I’m like, “They’re going out of business in a few years,” because they shouldn’t have put those fish people on their window. I do sometimes see things ahead and I have to figure out how to help people draw the lines is the place that I noticed it.

You picked a night-blooming cereus. You generally only are attracted to that flower when you are not in the mode of making baby steps in your growth. When you’re like, “I’m ready to jump off the cliff. I’m ready to take the big leap. I’m ready to take where my limitations are, toss them in the trash and do something very reckless and see what happens.” Does that resonate?

Yeah, I’ve been making this shift. I’m launching a whole bunch of big programs. I’m going from many years of one-on-one coaching to launching a big program for leaders. That’s a mastermind coaching, learning, networking program, a year-long program. It’s a huge step forward.

You picked dandelion. I would ask you, at this point do you have neck and shoulder tension? That’s the indicator. Dandelions would help you relax all your muscles and get some insights around which emotional or daily lifestyle routines will contribute to that crunch so that you can avoid it. Banana blossom, we’re typically drawn to that when we feel like we don’t have enough time either as time’s running out, we’re rushing or we don’t have enough time in the day. Time feels constricted. Banana blossom brings in this sense of like, “I have all the time in the world. I’m in the right place at the right time.”

I had 34 Zoom appointments.

How can you do that to yourself?

It was interesting work but it’s the time. I’m scaling up in my company. Time is challenging. My time has to be precious.

I think there’s a way to do those 34 meetings but inside of them, you can even feel more spacious.

Flower Remedy: Never ignore red flags in an interview because even the insignificant things may eventually become the root cause of a giant problem.

They were spacious but I do feel as I scale up, I’m super conscious of my time. As you’re saying all these things because I could have told you why I picked all these flowers and they have nothing to do with what you’re saying. Here you are giving this little reading, which I think it’s all super interesting.

Passionflower is when we’re going on high RPMs and our nervous system is a little bit frazzled and we need more deep sleep, rest, naps, to be able to let it go a little. How’s your sleep been?

I sleep it’s okay. I think it’s general fatigue. Maybe COVID fatigue that everyone has. We’re in heavy lockdown. I can’t go anywhere. I can’t go to a restaurant. I can’t go on a trip. I can’t go to my family. It may be deep fatigue that I’m doing the best I can but we’ve lost. Gyms are closed. We’ve been locked down, stay at home order since December 21st, 2020. It’s lifting somewhat because the kids are going back to school next week but it has been a long haul for me and my little family in our house. I love them all. I’m happy they’re going to go somewhere next week.

You chose trumpet vine, which is all about opening up your throat and smooth communication. It’s good for having hard conversations, talking about difficult things, with ease or singing, who knows maybe you have a singing career on the side.

No, but I have hard conversations all the time.

Brugmansia is when we feel a sense of responsibility in what we do so much so that we truly believe and know that we’re the best ones to do what we’re doing and no one else does it better than us. We have a reluctance to share or delegate. It’s a little bit of the workaholic flower. We tend to overwork and we don’t want to delegate because we would just do it better.

That one resonates the least of all of them for me. I did hire two people in my organization to delegate. Part of my mantra is to get myself out of that bottleneck. It’s nearby but that one’s not the one that feels as relevant to this moment in time.

Your last one is bamboo, which if you know anything about bamboo, some varieties can grow off of the day. It is out of my way botanical, meaning that it helps us make the impossible possible. It would be helpful in terms of your programs and the big leaps that you’re taking to get that momentum, determination. Nothing can stop you.

What do I do with all that now that you’ve given me this fantastic reading now?

I’m going to send you some remedies. You’re going to experiment recklessly with them. You don’t have to believe they’re going to work. You don’t have to think they will or they won’t. Experiment recklessly and see what happens.

I think you and I might do a Facebook Live when they come or as I experiment with them. We might do. We might talk about these a little more. This is super fun. I encourage everyone to have some fun with that quiz. This got way funner when I started playing with Katie, I think you should play with Katie too. Where can people find you?

You can find us on our website at LOTUSWEI.com. We’re on pretty much every social media channel there is. We also have a center in Phoenix, Arizona. If anyone comes out to the Southwest, we are in a 15,000 square foot building. It’s called the Self-Arising Nature Center and people can come and visit us as well.

What would I do if I visited you?

You probably make an appointment, come and have tea, we could do a flower card reading, you could try all the different elixirs and look around the space. Maybe you would get a botanical treatment. We take a bunch of roses and eucalyptus, other botanical material and rebalance your body with fresh botanicals.

I love flowers. It sounds amazing to me. I love the desert. I grew up in New Mexico so it’s not so far. Except now, it’s far because I’m behind a closed border and can’t come to the US but I dream of doing something like that. I dream of going almost anywhere now but flowers in the desert sound spectacular. Thank you so much for being on my show. It’s been such a pleasure to have you.

Thank you so much, Melanie.

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I’ve enjoyed talking with Katie about how she, as a leader, has learned to trust her deep intuition as she interviews people, looks at marketing and we talk about feedback loops a lot around the experimental leader. One feedback loop we don’t often talk about is that feedback loop within ourselves. How do we listen to that? Our own internal dialogue, how do we pull out what’s important there? Where do we find the red flags and elevate them? Where do we find the essence of what we want to bring into the marketplace or our organizations as leaders and listen to what we believe on the inside? It’s been amazing talking with Katie. Go experiment.

Important Links:

• Flower Evolution
• LOTUSWEI
• NCCAOM

About Katie Hess

Katie Hess is a flower alchemist, author of Flowerevolution, and founder of LOTUSWEI, one of the world’s leading floral apothecaries. With her signature elixirs featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, and the LA Times, her flower-powered community is thriving in over 15 countries.

With 17 years of independent research on flower and plant-based healing, Katie is a pioneer in her field. It is her life’s work to intuit which flowers to unearth at the right time, to unlock the qualities we most need.

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