The Importance of Leveraging Your Season
The power of finding your season, keeping your rhythm.
Winter is one of my favorite seasons. There’s something about drinking a hot cup of coffee on a cold winter morning that you can’t experience any other time of the year. Give me a few fresh books, a comfortable chair, some snow, and I’m set for days.
Winter mornings were few and far between in California. That hasn’t been the case since moving to DC. In fact, just last weekend we had our first snow and this morning as I’m starting this post it’s a bone-chilling twenty degrees outside. Besides from making me rethink my affection of winter, I can’t help but think about the natural rhythm of seasons. And, the seasons that our lives flow through.
There are seasons where we experience new growth. Seasons where we diligently cultivate what we’ve been working towards. Seasons where we reap the rewards of our hard work. Seasons where growth seems to go dormant.
For me personally, 2017 was a year where life seemed to reflect a more obvious and predictable rhythm. Even as I write this post I can see a season where I’ve reaped the reward of focused effort in 2017 beginning to taper off.
Life is uniquely tied to rhythm. Our environments have rhythms, our days have rhythms, and our hearts have rhythms. In this post, I want to share a few things I learned about rhythm this year and how I plan to leverage that knowledge in 2018.
Some Much Needed Background
At the beginning of every year, I do a simple exercise where I make a bunch of goals and create a plan to achieve them. These aren’t new years resolutions that are forgotten on February first, these are goals that I review weekly and actively work towards. I started doing this on a recommendation of a mentor when I was about 18 years old. At first, it was a chore, but after a few years, I realized that I was achieving year over year growth in multiple areas of my life that my peers were not.
At the beginning of 2017, I decided to start by asking the question “What do I want to gain from this year?” It seems like an obvious question when doing an exercise like this but, in reality, most of the questions I was asking in the past were more focused on things like the growth of my net worth, salary, or network.
The key difference in these types of questions is Purpose.
Asking “What do I want to gain from this year?” Instead of “What gains do I want from this year?” made me focus on the high-level purpose. This gave the effort I was putting towards achieving my goals meaning and answered the most important question … “Why?”
Investments vs Accomplishments
As I began to create my list of goals, I quickly came to realize that unlike the years before, many of them could not be quantified or measured on a monthly basis. It would take months of investing, stewarding, and cultivating areas of my life to before I could see any results of the effort I was exerting.
This went against everything I believe about goals and broke my motto of “if it’s not measurable it’s not achievable.”
Now, as I’m looking back on the year, these are the goals that impacted my life the most, brought the most satisfaction and oddly enough had the most momentum.
Planting Seeds
Think about it like this.
Every day you have the option to collect acorns or plant oak trees.
Collecting acorns is a great activity that allows you to see immediate results. Planting acorns, on the other hand, requires foresight, patience, and hard work.
When you plant a seed, you can’t tell if it’s growing until it sprouts, once it sprouts, you can’t tell if it’s the right type of sprout until it matures. Once it matures, you have to wait and see if it can produce.
This is where rhythm comes back into play.
Identifying and Partnering with Seasons
We’ve all experienced seasons where it feels like everything we touch turns to gold, on the other hand, we’ve all had seasons where no matter what we try to do it feels like we just fall on our face.
It crazy how easily we find ourselves in a place of toil and frustration from a determination to live by my own rhythm and ignore the natural rhythms of the world we live in. There’s a spring, a summer, a fall, and a winter. Each has their own value, for example:
- Spring might be your time to plant and invest
- Summer might be your time to steward and cultivate
- Fall might be your time to harvest
- Winter might be your time to plan and rest
Don’t be fooled, it’s rarely as simple as trying to create alignment with natural seasons. We have to develop the ability to identify and partner with rhythms and seasons of life, even when they don’t make sense.
How to Identify Your Seasons—
I’ve found that some seasons are easier and some are harder to identify. You have to start by looking at what’s happening around you.
Are you in a season where everything you touch turns to gold? That’s an indicator that you might be in a season of harvesting.
Are you in a season where nothing is working? You might be in a winter season where you should be planning and resting.
Are you in a season where you have a lot of opportunities? I would look at this as a planting or investing season.
Are you in a season where you seem to be grinding away hopelessly? You might be in a summer season where you’re working to cultivate a harvest.
How to Partner With Seasons —
Now that you have an idea about how to identify seasons, let’s talk about partnering with them.
In seasons when everything is turning to gold, it’s time to take risks that you normally wouldn’t. It’s time to ask for that raise, apply for that job, talk to that girl/boy you’ve been wanting meet. Not everything will plan out, but you have the rare opportunity to leverage momentum.
In seasons where nothing is working, it’s time to reassess. Take a good hard look at where you are, and why you are where you are. Start creating an action plan to get to where you want to be, then be patient and wait for a season of opportunity. Get yourself to a place where you are ready to commit 100% to an opportunity when it arises.
In seasons of opportunity, it’s time to leverage yourself. Seasons of opportunity generally come right after seasons of rest — and for good reason. This is the time to push your limits, add a few more items to your plate, try to do the things you wish you had more time to do. Most importantly, in seasons of opportunity focus on positioning yourself to be at the right place at the right time.
In seasons where you grind it out relentlessly, focus on systems and processes. Your ability to expand and reach higher levels is directly tied to your ability to persevere through resistance, create a system or process to manage it, and ultimately get to a place where you thrive under that level of pressure. The most important thing to remember in these seasons is that they don’t last forever.
Finally, How to Leverage Rhythm
There’s an old saying by Lao Tzu “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
Learning to partner with seasons will have minimal impact on your life if you are unable to maintain rhythm. Rhythm is what builds fortunes. It’s the ability to get up and take one more step no matter what life throws at you, or how you feel.
The difficult part about rhythm is that you have to create it on your own. You can’t pick up someone else’s rhythm, and you aren’t born with one. Rhythm is unique to you and is something you discover as life progresses.
The way to leverage rhythm is to create one and stick to it no matter what. It can be aggressive or it can be subdued. Its power lies in how you tap into it on a daily basis.
So in conclusion, find your season, keep your rhythm.
About the Author: Jesse Williams is a young entrepreneur, husband, father, technologist, and SaaS marketing expert. You can follow him on Twitter and learn more about him and his projects here.
