Blom

The seed underneath every sentence

A few weeks ago in a small Italian bistro in San Francisco, I shared a plate of olives with three rare human beings. The table was tiny. The conversation was immense.

Evan Walden, my co-founder at Getro. We have worked together for over a decade. At this point, more family than co-founder. Titiaan Plazzi, a founder with a major exit behind him, and one of the most spiritually grounded people anyone can meet. And Steven Blom, a serial entrepreneur I was meeting that evening.

The first thing I noticed about Steven was his smile. Bright, honest, warm, and a little mischievous. An extension of his heart.

Through our conversation, Steven explained how he steers himself and the people around him toward what they want. Some people treat this as a morning exercise. Steven lives it in every sentence. In his companies, he helps team members build vision boards as orientation. He keeps the image of what they are growing toward in front of them.

People who build companies at this level and remain this spiritually grounded are rare. Sitting with all three of them, the question kept surfacing: how do they hold both?

Steven answered it without trying. Being near him feels like standing in a room full of bright lilies, dahlias, and chrysanthemums. It uplifts you in ways difficult to describe. We laughed nonstop. It felt like a masterclass and a family dinner at the same time.

What Steven does requires something most people underestimate: bravery. The kind you bring to every sentence. Constant. Deliberate.

“It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.” Steven does not seem frightened of his.

Language shapes what the nervous system builds. Every word is a seed. It grows toward the image it carries, regardless of the intention you wrapped around it. “Don’t think about the past” and “stay here” point at the same desire. One plants you in the past. The other plants you here.

Steven makes you want to choose your words more carefully. Where you might say “I don’t want to lose presence,” he would say “I stay present.” Same meaning on the surface. Completely different seeds underneath.

Tell a child “don’t spill the milk.” Watch what happens next.

The nervous system hears the image. “Don’t spill” becomes a vivid picture of milk on the floor. The instruction creates the very thing it was trying to prevent.

You do this too. “I don’t want to be anxious.” Your body receives: anxious. “I won’t fail.” Your body receives: fail. The negation is invisible to the part of you that actually responds.

In 1987, Daniel Wegner ran an experiment at Trinity University. He asked people not to think of a white bear. They thought of it about once per minute. When he looked closer, he found the reason: the mind, in order to check whether it has succeeded at not thinking something, has to represent that very thought. The monitor becomes the messenger.

This goes beyond affirmation. Affirmations speak to who you want to become. This is precision. Choosing the image that matches the direction you are actually moving.

In 2015, Patrick Ring and his team at Kiel University measured skin conductance while people waited for electric shocks. Same probability of being shocked. Same shock. The only variable was the words used to describe the odds. One group heard it framed positively. The other, negatively. The group that received the negative framing showed measurably higher stress responses. Same situation. Different language. The skin responded to the framing, regardless of the facts.

A flower grows toward light. The orientation is everything. What it reaches for.

Blom means flower in Dutch. Of course it does. Every word is a seed. Even the ones we are born with.

Your language works the same way. What are your words growing toward?