Your career moves through seasons. Most people are still dressed for the wrong one.
Here we are, in late March. Yet Ottawa is still pretending it’s early February.
The calendar claims that spring arrived days ago, but the ground’s still frozen and the wind still bites. Everything feels delayed.
Sound familiar?
A lot of you are dragging around the same feeling at work. On paper, you’ve made it: pretty cool job title, a paycheck you can live with, and a résumé that looks respectable. You’re not embarrassed to tell people what you do for a living – but you’re exhausted by it. It’s just not you anymore. Deep down inside, it feels cold and heavy. Like you’re stuck wearing last year’s winter coat even though the seasons are supposed to have already changed.
Here’s what most people miss: your career will cycle through seasons.
Not one long straight ladder you climb and then sit on forever. Longer arcs. Cycles that play out over years, sometimes decades. Growth. Harvest. Quiet discontent. Rest. Then — when the timing is right — a new season of clearing space and trying something different.
These seasons don’t line up neatly with the calendar. Some personal winters stretch longer than you want. Some springs arrive early and catch you by surprise. That’s not failure. That’s just how cycles work.
What matters is knowing where you actually are in your bigger arc — and having the honesty to move with it instead of pretending the coat still fits.
For some of you, the next season might already be trying to push through. You can feel it. That low-grade restlessness. The sense that something needs to change even if you can’t exactly name it yet.
That’s spring energy. The willingness to let something old fall away and try something new — even if it makes you feel like a beginner again at 48, or 53, or 57.
That mess isn’t a sign that something’s wrong with you. That’s just your growth breaking through partially frozen ground.
So this week, do a little spring cleaning to your career. Not a total overhaul. Just an honest sort-through. Grab a notebook and run these three questions:
- What needs to burn? The outdated identities. The responsibilities that made sense five years ago but don’t fit who you’re becoming. The success metrics you’ve quietly outgrown. Name them. You don’t have to act today. Just stop pretending they still belong.
- What’s worth keeping? The core strengths. The experiences. The values that still fire you up even on the hard days. These are your roots. They come with you.
- What am I actually willing to plant? Not what sounds good. Not what you think you should want. What are you genuinely willing to tend — imperfectly, patiently, without a guaranteed outcome?
That last question is where most people bail. Because planting something means accepting that it might not take. A late frost can wipe out a seedling overnight. That’s part of the deal.
But sometimes — if you keep showing up — something takes hold. Grows. Produces more than you expected.
That’s the bet you’re making when you decide to move with the season instead of waiting for perfect conditions that never arrive.
Spring doesn’t wait for the ground to be ready. It pushes through anyway.
I’m curious where you are in the cycle right now. Hit reply and tell me — what season are you in? And what’s one thing that might need to burn?