There comes a point just at the start of autumn when you realise the season has changed. The evenings seem to arrive more quickly, there is a different feeling to the light, you reach for a coat you haven’t worn for months. Things that felt perfectly natural a few weeks ago suddenly seem slightly out of step.
We haven’t changed the clocks yet and yet something has already shifted.
What can autumn teach us about personal growth?
Autumn can remind us that personal growth is not always about expansion or doing more. Sometimes growth means consolidating what we have learned, releasing ways of living or working that no longer fit, and allowing our pace to change before we know exactly what comes next.
We think there is something interesting about that, because change in our own lives can happen in much the same way as it does in autumn.
For example, before we change jobs, make an announcement, alter a business, have a serious conversation or finally make a big decision, there can be a quieter period in which something simply doesn’t fit in quite the same way anymore. You may not yet know what the next season of your life looks like, you may simply know that you cannot keep living at the pace of the last one.
Sometimes change begins as a change of pace
We often imagine personal growth as expansion. Things like more confidence, more opportunities, more visibility, more ambition, more influence or more certainty. And sometimes it is. There are seasons in our lives when stretching ourselves is exactly what we need.
We try something new. We say yes more often. We start the business. We take on greater responsibility. We put ourselves forward. We explore an unfamiliar spiritual practice or begin asking questions about ourselves that we have previously avoided.
Growth can feel energising.
But eventually, expansion creates something else. Things to integrate. Decisions to make. Responsibilities to carry. Experiences to make sense of. Perhaps even parts of ourselves that have changed more quickly than our lives have changed around them.
At that point, growth may stop looking like adding something new and it may begin to look like becoming more discerning about what comes with you. Autumn offers a rather beautiful metaphor for this.
Nature is still active, but it is not behaving as though summer should continue indefinitely. There is release as well as growth. Energy is being redirected. The landscape changes its rhythm.
Perhaps we are allowed to do that too.
What worked in one season may not belong in the next
One of the strange things about change is that we can continue doing something long after the reason for doing it has disappeared. Such as a way of protecting ourselves may have been necessary once but not any more. A business strategy may have helped us establish ourselves, but now needs to do something else. Being the person who always knows the answer may have helped us build professional credibility, but now we need to make space for others to do the same. Working harder may even have been what got us through an especially demanding period, but now we need to make sense of what we have achieved.
None of these things have to have been mistakes, something does not have to be wrong for us to have outgrown it. That can be difficult to recognise because we naturally look for obvious evidence that something should change. Things like a crisis, a failure, burnout, conflict or some other dramatic moment of clarity. Sometimes there is no dramatic moment. There is simply the growing awareness that something which once felt aligned now requires more effort to maintain.
You may notice that you don’t react in quite the same way. You no longer need quite as much reassurance. A way of working that once felt exciting now feels exhausting. The pressure to prove yourself has become less compelling. You find yourself asking a different quality of question. You are less interested in being seen to have the answer and more interested in understanding what is actually happening.
These things can seem small. but they can be evidence that an internal season has already changed.
You may notice it in the way you relate to yourself
Personal change often becomes visible in very ordinary moments. Perhaps you recover more quickly when something goes wrong. Perhaps somebody’s disappointment no longer automatically becomes evidence that you have done something wrong. Perhaps a boundary that once required a great deal of courage now feels almost obvious or perhaps you have started noticing that the life you thought you wanted was partly built around the person you thought you needed to be.
This stage can be uncomfortable.
There may be a gap between recognising that the old way no longer fits and knowing what you want instead. It can be tempting to fill that gap quickly. To find a new identity, a new goal, a new spiritual practise, a new explanation. Anything that removes the uncertainty.
But there can be value in allowing ourselves to notice before we decide. Afterall, the leaves do not fall because the tree has failed to come up with a sufficiently ambitious plan for spring.
Some transitions require a period of release before there is anything useful to replace what has gone.
Your business can have seasons too
The same thing happens when we create work that matters to us. Particularly when the business is closely connected to our identity, creativity, values or spiritual life, it can be difficult to distinguish between persistence and simply continuing because we once decided this was what success should look like.
There may have been a season for experimenting, trying different offers, posting everywhere, learning everything and saying yes to opportunities because you needed to discover which ones fitted.
That season may have been useful, but growth does not always mean doing more of it.
Sometimes the next stage is consolidation. Asking which work actually matters? What are people responding to? What drains enormous amounts of energy without creating much in return? Which parts of the business grew from your values, and which grew from what you thought a ‘proper’ business was supposed to look like? What could become simpler?
This can feel less exciting than beginning something new.
There is very little glamour in reviewing a process, looking carefully at your finances, refining one offer instead of creating three more, or deciding that a platform everyone tells you that you should be using does not deserve your energy.
But that is growth too. It is the movement from proving that you can create something towards learning how you want to sustain it.
Leadership has seasons of expansion and consolidation too
Organisations can find this particularly difficult. We often make activity highly visible. Communicating about exciting projects, publishing plans, going to meetings, reporting against deliverables and milestones. These are easy to point to as evidence that something is happening.
Thinking is harder to see. So is listening. And sense-making. Just observing, noticing patterns and taking time to understand why a problem keeps returning or allowing people enough psychological safety to say that something isn’t working is not visible.
Sitting with uncertainty for long enough to discover that the problem we were preparing to solve is not actually the problem. For a leader accustomed to demonstrating value through action, a quieter season can feel deeply uncomfortable.
There can be a pressure to decide quickly, provide certainty and keep things moving, but leadership maturity sometimes asks for something different…the ability to recognise when another initiative will simply add noise. The confidence to ask another question before offering the answer. The willingness to create enough space for other people’s knowledge to emerge. Perhaps even the ability to recognise that the way you earned authority is not necessarily the way you now need to exercise it.
A person can grow into greater responsibility while simultaneously discovering that they need to occupy less of the room. That too is a change of season.
The uncomfortable space between the two
There is a particular stage of change that we find fascinating.
The old way has become visible. You can see the pattern. You might even understand why it developed, but the new way does not yet feel natural.
This is often where people assume change isn’t working. For example, you know you want to stop seeking everyone else’s approval, but you still feel uncomfortable when somebody disagrees with you. Or you know your business needs a more sustainable rhythm, but slowing down still feels frightening. Or you know you want to lead by creating space for other people to think, but part of you still wants to step in and fix the problem.
There can be a period when both versions of you seem to exist at once. The old response is familiar enough to happen automatically, the emerging response requires more intention.
None of that means you have gone backwards. It may simply mean that recognition has arrived before integration. This is an important part of the way we now think about meaningful change through humanistic magick.
Insight matters of course, but noticing something is not the same as having fully embodied an alternative. The work is often in that middle space: practising, experimenting, reflecting and slowly allowing a different way of being to become familiar enough that it starts to feel like yours.
Symbols can be a language for noticing
Symbolic systems can sometimes give us an interesting language through which to ask questions we might not otherwise have asked. The changing seasons can become prompts.
For example, where am I expanding? Where am I consolidating? What am I continuing out of habit? What needs structure now? What am I ready to stop carrying?
Someone who loves astrology or tarot might explore those questions through a birth chart or a particular card. Someone else might notice them while walking through fallen leaves. Someone else might encounter exactly the same questions in a coaching conversation, a journal, a strategy session or a difficult meeting at work.
The tool is not the change.
What matters is what the reflection allows us to recognise, and what we begin to do differently as a result.
A seasonal stocktake
Before deciding what you need to accomplish before the end of the year, it might be worth noticing the season you are actually in.
You could ask yourself “what am I still carrying because it belonged to an earlier version of me?” Not because it is necessarily bad, but because it may no longer fit.
Or “where has my relationship with something already changed?” Such as a person, your work, success, authority, or spirituality.
Or “what needs less expansion and more integration?” Something may not need another idea. It may just need time, repetition, structure or attention.
You might journal around these questions. You might take them on a walk. You might light a candle and make the reflection into a small seasonal ritual. You might use tarot, astrology or another symbolic practice if those things help you think. Or you might simply sit with them over a cup of tea.
The method matters less than giving yourself enough room to hear your own answer.
You are allowed to enter a different season
There can be tremendous pressure to maintain momentum.
Once we have become productive, ambitious, visible, useful, capable or dependable, reducing our pace can feel as though we are becoming less of something, but seasons remind us that continuity does not require sameness.
The version of you who needed to explore everything may eventually need to choose something. The version of you who needed to prove themselves may eventually need to trust themselves. The business that needed experimentation may eventually need consistency. The leader who built credibility by knowing the answer may eventually become more powerful by asking better questions. None of these later stages invalidate what came before them, they simply grow from them.
Perhaps that is what the changing season can offer us: permission to notice that we are already changing.
As the light alters gradually, as the temperature shifts, as the evenings draw in, we eventually look around and realise that the season we were trying to hold on to has already gone. Sometimes our task is to simply stop living as though the last one never ended.
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