What Season Are You In?

At the risk of sounding like a stereotypical Brit, it really has got cold, hasn’t it? One minute it was mild, middle-of-the-road autumn, and the next we were apparently living in Antarctica. And I’ll be honest: I don’t love winter. I’m trying to get better at it, but it’s not my natural habitat. I get sulky. I lie in bed insisting I can’t bear being cold. I crane my neck out of the window in search of the sun whenever it makes any kind of an appearance.

When I say I’m trying to get better at winter, what I really mean is I’m trying to stop resisting it. To accept that it has its place. I even asked ChatGPT for a motivational reason to appreciate winter, but it was so spectacularly un-motivational I can’t bring myself to share it.

Still, even I have to admit this: we don’t get the joy of spring and summer without a winter beforehand. It makes the light feel lighter, the warmth feel warmer. And winter does give us real fires, cosy evenings, blankets, crisp walks…

Okay. Maybe it’s not so terrible after all.

If I’m honest, I feel the same way about those as I do about the real ones. If I had my way, life would be one long summer, with a bit of spring thrown in. I like spring. New beginnings, bunnies, exciting ideas, the sense that something good is taking shape. Being in the heyday is my happy place. (If I ever start a new company, I might call it Heyday. I digress.)

Very few of us (except perhaps the dedicated ascetics) look forward to the metaphorical winters. The letting-go seasons. The lonely, end-of-an-era moments. The grieving seasons. Nothing-looks-like-it’s-happening seasons. The hidden seasons.

One has to fall away so the next can begin. If I cling nostalgically to the golden years of parenting, I miss the joy of knowing my children as young adult friends. Redundancies open the door to new jobs. Drafting and editing in private eventually becomes a finished manuscript.

In my new book (did you know I had a book out NEXT WEEK?), there’s a whole section on recognising the season you’re in. Early readers have told me how surprisingly profound they found it. That it made them pause, reflect, and reassess where their life is right now and how they’re moving through it. In this week’s podcast, Laura and I dig into this idea of life seasons and help you (and ourselves) work out which season you’re in, and what you can do to prepare for what’s next. It’s definitely worth a listen.

If you want to think about it now, here’s the short version of the four metaphorical seasons to help you diagnose where you are right now:

This is the fresh-start phase: new projects, new roles, early progress, and that shaky-but-exciting sense that something is taking shape.

This is the hitting-your-stride season. The work starts to show. Things feel productive, energised, visible. You can actually see the return on all that earlier effort. The heyday.

Here’s where you pause and take stock. What’s worked? What hasn’t? What needs to change? You start gathering the lessons and gently preparing for whatever’s round the corner. You’re happy, but you’re wistful. You sense change is afoot.

This is the stripping back season. Something ends. Something shifts. It’s quieter, slower, more reflective, the space where the next beginning quietly starts forming. It’s hard, possibly lonely, grieving, adjusting. But something new is coming.

If you want to look at this in more detail, you’ll find full descriptions, examples, and how to move forward in my book, The Purpose Pursuit.

As I may have mentioned, it’s out next week (!) so this is the perfect time to get the order in! (please).

Perhaps you can think of a friend who is in a tough season right now. You know they feel stuck, and like winter is like Narnia: never-ending. The gift of my book might just help them see that spring is just around the corner. In the inimitable words of the well-known philosopher, Florence (of And The Machine):

It’s Always Darkest Before The Dawn.

With love,

Hannah x

P.S. You have one day left to enter the social competition - win some great stuff just for buying the book - take a look here, you’ve got to be in it to win it!