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Hello, everyone. So as I sat down to think about what topic I wanted to do a solo episode on this week, I was looking outside and there was rain coming down in sheets. And the days right now just feel so short and so dark. And it really had me reflecting on the cyclical nature of life. And not just in our external environment, but also in our internal one as well. And
If we pay attention, we will notice that we have the same four seasons that play out for us internally and in our careers, in our relationships, in our passions and creativities and families, even the economy. Nothing is static. Nothing stays in full bloom forever. We consistently will go through cycles of summer, fall, winter, spring, and back to summer once again. And yet,
how many of us subconsciously expect ourselves, especially in our careers, to stay in a perpetual state of peak performance, to always be in summer, to always be thriving and producing and hitting metrics and hitting the next goal. And very often what I see with my clients is that when we're feeling low energy or low motivation or we're falling short of our goals in some way, we assume that something's wrong, that we're wrong.
And this is something that I support my high achieving clients with so often on their career redesign journeys, is that they come to me knowing, look, something's not working or something feels off in my career, but they don't have clarity on what the root cause is or what they're actually empowered to shift in order to make it feel better. And so often when we dig in, what we actually uncover is that there is a misalignment
between the internal season that they're currently in and the season they are trying to force or wish they were in in their career or in their business. And so, so often with the clients that I coach, especially those who've had success and built a good life and built a career where at least at one point in time they felt highly motivated in and aligned and it felt really successful.
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Very often when we start to feel the pull to move on to something new, we're in resistance. And my clients will try to force themselves to just stay motivated or stay in a career that at some level they know they've outgrown. Maybe you can relate. Maybe you too want to stay in that never ending summer, even when you're feeling that pull that it's time to evolve, it's time to reinvent, it's time to redesign. And rather than really
consider and to lean into what that would require of you in order to realign, in order to thrive, very often we find ourselves stuck trying to grasp back at summer. And so today I wanted to share with you a model that I learned in my coaching institute and that I so often will share with clients. And it really teaches us
What is the purpose of each of these seasons that we can find ourselves in and find ourselves in in our career? And what are the invitations? What's the growth? What's the work? And when we're able to identify what season we're in, accept that we're in that season, and act on the growth opportunities available to us, we're really able to create career alignment. And we can start to feel like we're rowing downstream with the current.
rather than feeling like we're rowing upstream against it. So today we're gonna talk about the seasonal model and dive into each of the four seasons and the lessons available within each and also the things to look out for, the pitfalls to avoid so that you can identify what season you're currently in, see what's required of you and really step into action that's going to make you feel aligned and alive and empowered. Okay, so.
To understand this seasonal model, first, we have to accept the fact that we are human beings. We're not machines. And because we're not machines, we are a part of nature. We are also a part of its natural cycles. And just like the days are shorter and many animals are in states of hibernation or conservation of energy right now before the massive growth spurt of spring comes, we are meant to as well.
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Our desires, our energy levels, our creativity, our growth, our careers, they are meant to continuously evolve and shift. We're not meant to be stagnant. And now it doesn't always mean that our internal season will match our external season. Very often, we could be in an internal season of summer in an external season of winter, or we could be in an internal season of winter in an external season of spring, right?
But it does mean that our internal seasons will shift. And part of our job in order to honor our authentic selves and really stay in alignment in our lives and careers is to give ourselves permission to shift, to accept the fact that we are going to go through many, many cycles of summer, fall, winter, spring throughout our lives if we're lucky and if we live a long life. No season will last forever. Spring won't.
and winter won't. Things when they feel dreary and hopeless, spring will always come again. And when it feels like everything's going your way, enjoy it because it will at some point shift and come to an end. And yet so often we subconsciously expect ourselves to work linearly, have the consistency of a machine. And especially for all my high achieving clients and listeners,
who've already built these successful careers, we so often get stuck wanting to continue to be and feel successful even when we're meant to start again. And so we resist the shifting of seasons. We resist what is. And this is where we can get ourselves into so much trouble. And this is something I really struggled with personally in my last corporate chapter. I was at that last company for eight years. And for a
About the first year or two, I was in that high growth, high learning period that can be equated with spring. And then for the next four or five years, I was in a summer where I was absolutely crushing it professionally and the company as a whole was doing well. It felt so good. I loved it. I felt like I was exactly where I was meant to be. But then the last year or two, I felt that season of summer coming to an end. And yet I fought it tooth and nail.
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Like I could see the market had shifted. I felt my own energy and passion for what I was doing start to wane. I wasn't growing in the same way and I didn't feel as invested as I had once been. And I just no longer believed in or wanted to keep climbing the corporate ladder and growing in the same direction. And at some level, like I knew that it was time to make a change. But that felt really confronting and I really resisted that reality. I just thought that
if I worked harder or if I ignored it, those problems would go away. It's like I saw all the leaves falling off all of the trees around me. And yet rather than accepting, OK, fall has come, time to shift, time to evolve, I was spending my time running around with a glue gun trying to glue all the leaves back onto the trees. But I couldn't glue fast enough as the leaves were falling.
And I made myself the problem. I told myself I was failing. I tried to source motivation to push myself harder. But the truth was that I was entering a season of realignment. And I was attempting to override my inner knowing. But I was no longer motivated by the same goals I once was. I had more than met my need for safety and security at that point in my career. And I fortunately made more money than I
could spend or needed. And what I wanted had changed. As I was looking to get married and start a family, I realized what I really wanted was more time and flexibility, not another bonus or raise. And so the sources of fuel that once energized me just felt totally flat. And yet for the better part of the year, I was just trying to fight fall. I was trying to fight this reality, running around with my little glue gun and telling my inner voice to shut up rather than just accept.
the seasons had changed. And it wasn't until that I learned about the seasonal model in my coaching institute that everything I experienced during that time began to make sense. And I finally had the language and a framework for what was happening for me internally. And I could see that this was natural and that there were lessons and growth available in this season and that it was happening for me, not to me. And when I felt empowered to take the actions,
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that would fuel my future success and alignment rather than fight the seasons and burn myself out and make myself miserable, that is what has allowed me to rebuild, to reinvent, design my career to be where I'm at today. So let's dive into what each of these seasons looks like in our lives and careers and what each season requires of it in order to move through successfully. So let's start with fall.
So fall is when the things that once excited or energized us begin to feel flat or stale or they just stop working entirely. Our energy starts to wane. We begin to feel that inner knowing that we've outgrown this chapter and it's time to close it and it's time to evolve. And this is a felt experience. It's not a logical one. It's kind of like a bodily sensation we have, you know, when you feel the need to pee or the sensation of thirst and that you need water. You just know it to be true.
And fall really asks us to release our attachment to summer success and to begin to realign with what's true for us now, not what used to be true. And it requires us to surrender our sense of control and really prepare ourselves to enter a state of deeper introspection. And the purpose of fall is to help us to evolve into our next iteration so we can continue to feel
open and energized and aligned rather than stuck and disempowered. So to navigate fall successfully, we have to accept the shift in seasons and focus on what do we need to do to close this chapter out with integrity in a way that we're proud of. And we have to prep for winter and set ourselves up with the necessary time and space and resources to be able to introspect and detox.
from our addiction to constant productivity and hustle and results. We have to accept that every arrow needs to pull back before it can inevitably shoot forward once again and see this as a part of the process rather than a personal failing, which can be so hard to do in our hustle-focused society. And we really here have to acknowledge and celebrate all of our achievements, all of our growth, all of our lessons that we learned in this last cycle.
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while starting to create the space to explore what may come next. If we fail to do this, we get stuck. We're trying to cling to summer as I did. We lack energy and motivation. We can feel just totally oppressed by the mundane routine of work or what we've built or what we know. And very often, we end up feeling disempowered or irritable or entitled or unproductive.
And our logical brain is trying to tell us all the reasons that we have it so good and that we should want to stay in our current chapter of summer, just be grateful for our lives. And we attempt to override that inner knowing, but it really disconnects us from our natural source of energy. And that's when burnout can set in and force the change in seasons for us. So however we get there, when we arrive in winter, we enter the space between chapters in which one has closed,
but the other hasn't begun yet. So our energy in winter is super low, and we have to detox from our addiction to productivity and simply allow ourselves to be. And we have to really create the space and give ourselves permission to grieve what has now passed and find the courage to listen to what is real for us in this moment and what we truly care about. So.
In winter, our clarity fades and our identity starts to shift and all of our suppressed emotions that we didn't want to or didn't have time to feel before often rise to the surface. And here I describe it as going through a kind of metamorphosis. Like we enter a chrysalis as a caterpillar in winter and we essentially turn to mush where we lose all shape and all sense of ourself and we can't distinguish up from down. But then eventually we start to find ourselves again. We start to take on a new shape. We figure out
who we're meant to be in this next chapter, what's meant to come next, and we're able to emerge from the chrysalis on the other side as a butterfly. But to do this, we have to fully surrender and allow ourselves to recognize and shed old patterns and outgrow old identities. We have to face what's no longer working and accept responsibility for changing our own lives. And when we do this, we make new room to rediscover who we actually are and what actually matters to us in this season.
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We listen to our inner voice, we clarify our values, and we really make space to connect with whatever brings us joy and allows us to feel inspired by life again. And if we do this in late winter, we begin to feel renewed energy and renewed motivation. We become reconnected to our truth and we're able to clarify our vision that's really based out of desire rather than fear. And we start to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
we begin to get these pings of inspiration again. And our job here in late winter is to really gather all of these seeds of ideas for what could potentially come next and park them somewhere so that we don't forget and continue to revisit them until we arrive at clarity of what we really want for the next chapter. Moving through winter successfully requires us being still. It requires introspecting and moving through these waves of
big feelings. It often looks like an ego death, which can be very confronting. And look, most of us tend to avoid this, right? It's uncomfortable oftentimes to do this deep inner work. And it can be hard to get still enough to build intimacy with ourselves. Many of us choose instead or feel more comfortable distracting ourselves from this depth of feeling with addictions to things like scrolling on Instagram or TikTok or
online shopping, or remaining productive and doing little tasks around the house, or insert your coping mechanism here. But avoiding winter only causes us to stay stuck and to go back to what feels safe, not what's actually aligned. And we just end up repeating the same patterns again and again until we actually learn the lessons available to us. But when we successfully do this work of winter, eventually spring does come.
And in spring, now we arrive at a sense of clarity around our vision that has been built from alignment and truth rather than ego and conditioning. And so of all those seeds that we collected in late winter, now we start to sift through and see which of these seeds has had enough energy to sprout into a little seedling. And now we have this clarity of vision of what sits at the top of the next mountain.
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that we want to climb. And after allowing ourselves that time to slow down during winter, we also have renewed energy. have an influx of energy we need to begin climbing again. And now it really, in this spring season, becomes about taking messy and courageous and imperfect actions so that we can build positive momentum and we can stay with it and stay consistent long enough to climb and eventually reach the summit.
And in spring, there's this sense of optimism about the future. We feel engaged and we feel passionate. But spring is also unknown territory. We don't know exactly how we're going to get to the summit. And so we have to lean into trust and devotion and resilience rather than letting ourselves get hamstrung by fear or self-doubt or perfectionism or a need to control things. This is where we're A-B testing. We're making it exist first and trusting that we can make it better later.
It's about treating all failure as feedback and falling forward rather than letting it stop us. But this season can be especially hard for perfectionists or those who really source their sense of self-worth from being considered excellent or receiving gold stars. In this season, we're often brought face to face with our insecurities, our fear of failure, imposter syndrome. We can feel the urge to quit and run back to the comfort of our old life or our old career. But to move through sping...
But to move through spring successfully, we have to humble ourselves and allow ourselves to be a beginner again and to put in the effort, put in the hours, put in the reps that it takes to work to develop mastery. And if we're able to stick with it, finally, after the work of spring, we arrive in summer once again, where we can experience that ease and that celebration and that success. And here, what was once just a vision,
in late winter or early spring has actually become actualized. And now in summer, our work is to refine it further rather than simply make it exist and to bring our vision to full completion. Summer invites us to really land where we're planted, to grow even deeper roots that suck up even more of the nutrients from the earth, and to allow our branches to grow and to bear fruit.
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It really invites us to deepen our mastery and to...
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And it really invites us to deepen our mastery. And here we also, feel in flow. We feel like we're good at what we're doing. We feel like we're making our mark. And summer is this opportunity to enjoy the fruits of our labor and to let the warmth wash over us. But those who struggle with summer, and yes, there are people who struggle with summer, they often fail to celebrate themselves. They fail to look back at their success or reflect on how far they've come.
They don't let themselves enjoy it or feel the warmth or feel ease. There can be an urge to just jump to the next goal, jump to the next milestone, rather than really building true mastery in this one. Summer can also feed our ego and make us feel really addicted to the significance or the approval, the money, the power which we're receiving. And that can really act as a corruptive force that leads us to eventually fight that quiet knowing.
when the season begins to wane and fall comes again, which can lead to that burnout. But if we do acknowledge the subtle restlessness when it's time to evolve again, we once again return to fall and we continue our way through the seasons. And no season is good or bad. So often we're like, summer's good, winter's bad. No, each season has its purpose. Each season has its purpose and has its value. And when we learn to honor our seasons rather than fight them,
our lives and careers just become so much more easeful and so much more aligned. And since my own difficult transition from summer to fall in my last corporate career, I have moved through the seasons of winter and spring, and I'm now back in an early summer and an entirely different career path now as a career redesign coach versus a tech executive. Not every shifting of seasons and cycles will be this drastic, but
For me in this moment, in this new summer, in this new career, I feel so on purpose, so creative, so motivated, so impactful. And I've built this successful business, and I've built the structures and the systems and the support to allow it to run predictably. And I am enjoying the fruits of my labor. And yet, I know this season won't last forever. At some point, it will come to an end.
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And that invitation to evolve will come again. But now I know that I have already successfully moved through all of the seasons. And I know that while going through winter can be hard, it can also lead to such beauty and such purpose and such alignment. And when I can ground into the fact that this season is temporary, I can enjoy it for as long as it lasts. And then I can accept
the nature of life rather than fighting it when it's time to shift. So I really invite you to consider what season are you currently in? And are you currently in acceptance of that or resistance? Can you identify the invitations and the growth opportunities that are available to you in this season? And are you able to act on what's required of you to successfully move through it? And this is the work that each of us gets to do if we care about creating
personal and professional alignment and fulfillment and conscious success in our lives. So if this resonates with you and if you're looking for support to navigate whatever season that you're in, let's talk. Generally, I work with my one-on-one clients in our coaching containers who are in a fall or a winter season and trying to really complete the last chapter and source the clarity and confidence to find or see what's next. And in
This October, very exciting, I will be launching an intimate mastermind for women who are in their spring season, who have a vision of a business or revenue stream of their own that they're looking to build through spring and want to do so in community with strategy and with support that's required to be successful. So if this is you and you're in a fall, a winter or a spring season and you're looking for support and coaching, reach out to me, DM me on Instagram.
Conscious Success Co. and Let's Chat. And as a thank you for being here and for listening, if you wanna steal my seasonal model of embodiment workbook that I share with my coaching clients, just shoot me a DM on Instagram and I will be happy to send it through. I know your attention is so precious and I'm so grateful that you've chosen to spend your precious air bed time here with me. So I hope you have a wonderful week. I hope this serves you and I will see you in next week's episode.
