The Energy of a New Season: What September Still Asks of Us

Somewhere in most of us, September still smells like new stationery. A crisp exercise book. Polished shoes that pinch slightly at the heel. Even decades after we leave the school gates behind, the ninth month arrives carrying an old, familiar instruction: begin again.

It's a strange kind of muscle memory. January gets all the attention as the "fresh start" month, loud with resolutions most of us privately expect to abandon by February. But September does something quieter, and I'd argue more useful. In the UK especially, the rhythm is built into us from age four or five: summer loosens its grip, the light changes, and somewhere inside we brace, sit up a little straighter, and get ready to start a new term.

Long before academia, I was a fashion designer, an industry that lives and dies by the seasons in the most literal sense possible. Spring/summer, autumn/winter, always working months ahead of the world around you, always asking what's coming next before it arrives. That rhythm shaped how I think in a way I didn't fully appreciate until much later: seasons aren't just weather, they're permission structures for change, if you're paying attention to them.

I carried that instinct into higher education leadership, where I watched this pattern play out every year without fail, not just in eighteen-year-olds arriving for freshers' week, but in colleagues twenty years into their careers, suddenly re-energised by the return of the timetable. It wasn't really about the calendar. It was about permission. September gives us permission to reset that January, with all its pressure and proclamation, somehow doesn't. I carry that same instinct now into coaching, where I watch this seasonal pull show up in women who've never designed a single stitch of clothing but still feel it every year without quite knowing why.

Change is inevitable. The question is whether you move with it.

I think often of a line from Toni Morrison:

"If you surrender to the air, you can ride it."

Autumn doesn't ask you to force anything. The season is changing regardless of what you decide to do about it, the light is already shortening, the energy around you is already shifting from expansive summer to focused, purposeful autumn. The only real choice is whether you notice that shift and use it, or stay locked in August's slower pace out of habit.

There's a physiological reason resisting this is so tiring: your brain treats uncertainty much like it treats physical threat, which is why bracing against a change already underway costs more energy than moving with it. Autumn, in that sense, is a gift. The change is already sanctioned, expected, structurally supported. You're not fighting the current, the current already has a name and a start date.

This is as true for leadership as it is for anything else, whether you're leading a team, an organisation, or simply the life you're building day by day. The best leadership I've witnessed, and the best I've had to find in myself, rarely comes from grand five-year strategies announced with fanfare. It comes from noticing what season you're in, and adjusting accordingly. Summer is for expansiveness, softness, rest. Autumn is for focus, for harvesting what you've learned, for asking honestly: what actually matters now?

Refocusing on meaning, not just output

There's a trap accomplished people fall into every September, and every January, and if we're honest, most Mondays: mistaking busyness for meaning. A new term, a new quarter, a new phase can just as easily become another list of things to push through as it can a genuine reconnection with why you're doing any of it.

The lesson I keep relearning, through leading teams, through leading myself, through coaching women who are quietly exhausted by their own competence, is that meaning doesn't arrive through more effort. It arrives through attention. Through actually stopping to ask what you want this next season to feel like, not just what you want to achieve in it.

Some practical steps:

Musing is important. I believe in it deeply; it's most of what good coaching is. But reflection without a next step can quietly become another form of avoidance. So here are a few ways to carry this into your own September, or whatever new-term energy you're standing at the edge of. Take what's useful, adapt the rest, make it yours.

1. Name your one word. Not a list of goals, one word for the energy you want this season to carry. Focus. Ease. Courage. Let it be a compass, not a checklist.

2. Do one autumn clear-out. Not your wardrobe, your commitments. What's one thing you're carrying into this season out of habit rather than genuine choice?

3. Write your why in one sentence. If someone asked why this season matters to you, could you answer in a single, honest sentence? If not, that's worth sitting with.

4. Borrow the ritual, skip the guilt. Buy the new notebook. Sharpen the metaphorical pencils. There's real psychological value in marking a fresh start physically, even as an adult, no five-year plan required.

5. Choose your next small step, not your whole plan. You don't need the entire year mapped out today. You need one thing you can genuinely start this week.

Wherever this season finds you, mid-career, mid-life, or mid-something you haven't quite named yet, you don't have to have it all figured out to begin.