Walking toward her across a field so green I half-expected to turn emerald myself, I could see her tall branches first. They were reaching up, up, up for the sky. Only up close did I find the rest of her story: the gashes at the base of the trunk, the broken limbs, the old smooth scars.

How do you count tree rings when a tree has more than one life?

I wondered about her wounds — what caused them, how long they’d been there, and when she had decided to put out new growth. Nervous she might not want to tell me those parts of her story, I gently ran my fingers over the grooves in the bark, sat down to lean my back on her trunk, and, together, we listened to the doves coo.

How did I find myself wandering the grounds of an 18th-century château in Burgundy, France, on a Tuesday morning in April?

I’d come for The Soft Reset, a weeklong retreat hosted by the founders of Bonfire. In an impossibly beautiful setting, we spent time walking, resting, exploring creativity, writing, and reconnecting with our individual values and visions.

The week felt like a nice, long exhale and helped me reset my outlook on the work I’m currently doing. One outcome was clarity that I’d like to do more of the work that had brought me to the retreat in the first place. In addition to participating, I had been invited to lead two sessions during the retreat: a Noticing Walk and a workshop on my Career Seasons Framework.

This Noticing Walk led me to the tree above. As a group, we set out on our walk through the French Countryside. I passed around the field guide I’d made and told everyone we were going to do something deceptively simple: practice noticing.

In honor of Earth Day, I want to enthusiastically encourage you to set aside 45 minutes this week to step outside and notice. If you can’t walk right after reading this post, open up your calendar and schedule it. Right now! I’ll wait. :)

The impact of physical space on internal reality

While preparing for this trip, I started reading the work of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. I was drawn to his writing because the introduction of his own book describes him as “an unusual man, with an unusual career, and an even more unusual mind.”

Bachelard believed that the spaces we grow up in and, as we grow older, the spaces we build meaning in, transform our cognitive reality. In one of his books, The Poetics of Space, he explains:

“By changing space, by leaving the space of one's usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating.”

Bachelard studied poets to understand the impact space can have on people. He used literary exploration to understand how poets used intimate spaces like homes, attics, cellars, gardens, etc., to describe their personal, inhabited worlds.

Borrowing his method, I immediately thought of the poet Mary Oliver. As a kid, she spent hours in the woods, walking and walking to escape a difficult home life. She kept walking throughout her entire life, always with a notebook in her pocket. One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from Mary Oliver is that paying close attention to what’s happening outside of you trains the same muscle you need to notice what’s happening inside you.

Before I outline the instructions for a Noticing Walk, I’ll leave you with this poem:

Praying by Mary Oliver

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

5 Steps for a Noticing Walk

1. Step Outside: This doesn’t have to be equivalent to the French countryside. Just find a place with fresh air and a touch of nature. Think: a park, a sidewalk with weeds coming through the cracks, your backyard, a planter outside a coffee shop. Take a very deep breath and exhale out loud.

2. Go slower than you normally do: Natural environments replenish your directed attention, but only when you slow down enough to register the space. I like to compare this to going on a walk with a toddler, where you stop and really, really look at things.

3. Practice Noticing: During the course of the walk, use the Field Guide (*I’ll share how to print it out at the end of this section) to:
- Find something that is new, just emerging.
- Find something at its peak, full output.
- Find something fading, releasing.
- Find something dormant, recovering.

4. Document what you notice: Draw or write down what catches your eye as you walk. Or, you can take pictures. Or just use the Field Guide as a reference, sit with what you notice, and study it for a while before moving on.

5. Turn your outward attention inward: Coming back to another Gaston Bachelard quote: "The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur to unfold." From what you noticed during your walk, was there anything that felt most relatable to where you are today (emerging, full output, releasing, recovering)? On the back of the Field Guide, circle the season your day-to-day life most closely resembles. Don’t overthink it! There isn’t a right or wrong answer. And, like our tree friend, you might be experiencing more than one season at once.

*Print the Field Guide
I was inspired by my friend, Jordan, to make this Zine. If you’d like instructions on how to cut and fold it into a booklet, head here.

Share what you notice

Share in the comments or tag me in a Note! Here’s what I noticed during my own Noticing Walk:

• Just emerging: Ferns beginning to unfurl.

• Full output: This periwinkle flower seemed very happy with the place it’d found, sheltered by an old stone wall.

• Fading, releasing: This leaf that looked like it belonged closer to my home in San Francisco, on the streets of Haight Ashbury.

• Dormant, recovering: This beautiful tree, healing from a past break.

Discover your Career Season

After you’ve gone on your Noticing Walk, use The Career Season Finder to see if you land in the same season you circled on the Field Guide. The Career Season Finder is a tool I developed, first for myself and then for others, for navigating career misalignment with clarity and self-trust.

No season is right or wrong, good or bad. They are all important parts of a healthy system undergoing a transition. Knowing what season I am in helps me have more agency and make better decisions for my career and life.

Continued Reading

Below, you’ll find:

• 4 lessons I’ve borrowed from nature

• 1 exercise relating the lesson to your career

• 1-2 questions for exploring the lesson further

Field Note #1: find your edges

📍 Location: Hellman Hollow, Golden Gate Park

🔎 Observation

I first spotted this coyote at the edge of the meadow, peeking out between two bushes and surveying the closest human. The said human was stretching with headphones in, oblivious to the coyote sizing them up.

Once the coyote confirmed the stretching human was not a threat, it slipped out from the bushes unhurried and unbothered to cross the meadow.

🌀 Career Lesson

Coyotes are “edge habitat specialists,” meaning they thrive in transitional zones between habitats. They are a great example of how setting up shop between two distinct habitats can be more resource-rich for generalists than either habitat alone. Because so many species are specialized for one side or the other, there’s less competition in the edge habitat.

Similarly, some people do their best work at this seam between two distinct areas.

The advice to "niche down" assumes that a clearly defined lane is always an asset. But for edge specialists, forcing a single lane often means abandoning the most interesting and resource-rich part of your range. You end up less competitive, not more, because you've moved into territory where specialists already dominate.

✏️ Exercise

The next time you find yourself fiddling with your resume to make it fit one lane, try using this template:

I work at the intersection of [X] and [Y]. Most people in [X] don’t know [Y], and most people in [Y] don’t know [X]. That gap is where I work.

For me, that looks like:

I work at the intersection of ecology and career design. Most career coaches don’t spend hours observing plant growth and animal behavior. Most naturalists don’t think about adaptive strategy as a framework for career transitions. That gap is where I work: helping career changers design their next move the way living systems actually work, not the way career advice says they should.

💬 Reflection Questions

• What are the ecosystems you move between?

• What can you see from that intersection that others can’t?

Field Note #2: contextual value

📍 Location: Lindley Meadow, Golden Gate Park

🔎 Observation

Blowing on a Dandelion and watching the seed heads scatter immediately makes me feel like I’m six years old in the middle of summer break.

Dandelions are native to Eurasia, so they are often treated as invasive in many parts of North America. But this same plant that gets yanked from lawns provides essential ecosystem services. Before most native flowers bloom, dandelions are a reliable food source for early-season pollinators. Their taproots break up compacted soil, creating space for more selective plants to sprout.

🌀 Career Lesson

In careers, work that gets labeled as a distraction or a skill set that is “not what we’re looking for” is rarely about inherent ability. It’s about alignment with a specific context at a specific moment.

Learning I had ADHD as an adult helped me take a bunch of beliefs I’d tucked into my perceived-personality-flaws drawer and move them over to my create-the-right-conditions drawer. Understanding that my brain is wired for pattern recognition and hyperfocus has shifted my approach to work. Practically, this has looked like reducing work that requires sustained linear focus and building more of my work around sprints. Same brain, different architecture.

✏️ Exercise

Draw two columns. Label the left one “weed” and the right one “Dandelion”.

In the left column, write 2–3 traits or skills you've been told to tone down, leave off your resume, or "work on."

In the right column, for each one, write a specific moment when that was exactly what the situation needed.

💬 Reflection Question

• Have you been in an environment that labeled something about you as a “weed” that you know is actually a strength?

Field Note #3: experiments should start and stop

📍 Location: Muir Woods National Monument

🔎 Observation

See those wiggly bits of bark? That’s not a weird distortion in this image.

As Coast Redwoods grow, they introduce genetic variation in response to changing conditions. They try out different strategies, like wiggly bark to insulate against fire, gather evidence, and then adapt. The record of this experiment is still visible in the grain.

🌀 Career Lesson

It is tempting to treat experiments like investments. Once you’ve started, you might feel the weight of ‘sunk cost’ or the relentless grip of identity that drives you to continue down a certain path longer than you should.

This specific Coast Redwood tested out a new bark pattern but didn’t find a strong enough benefit (see: charred bark), and returned to straight bark higher up on the trunk.

Apply this lesson to career experiments: try something new, gather data on whether the benefit is there, and if it isn’t, return to baseline. That’s not failure or sunk cost, it’s the experiment working exactly as designed.

✏️ Exercise

The next time you start something new, add an exit condition from the start:

If I haven’t seen [specific signal] by [specific date], I stop.

Make it something easy to measure, like:

If I haven’t had one paying client for this offering by June, I retire it.

💬 Reflection Questions

• What are you working on right now that needs a clearer exit condition?

• Could another person verify it independently? ("one paying client" passes. "feeling more momentum" doesn't.) If not, make it more concrete.

  

Field Note #4: active stillness vs. passive avoidance

📍 Location: San Francisco Botanical Garden, Golden Gate Park

🔎 Observation

I spotted this Great Blue Heron mid-February, in a particularly quiet corner of the Botanical Garden. Most visitors were here for the magnolia blooms but this statue-still Heron was there for lunch. It was patiently waiting for the precise moment to strike.

🌀 Career Lesson

In our working lives, the dominant narrative is that motion is the proof of effort. We tend to conflate looking active with doing the work. But some of the best career moves are made from sitting in a situation long enough to understand it.

But it’s important to distinguish between active stillness and passive stillness.

The heron’s stillness is active. It’s reading conditions, tracking subtle flickers of movement underground, calibrating the exact angle and timing of the strike. It’s different from the passive stillness of avoidance, which is closing your eyes and waiting for discomfort to resolve on its own.

✏️ Exercise

Think of one thing in your career you’ve been sitting still on, a decision you haven’t made, a move you’ve been deferring to ‘some day’, a conversation you’ve been putting off.

Write down the specific information or data point you are gathering that will inform this decision.

If you can name it, you’re in heron mode. If the answer is vague or missing, you might be in avoidance mode.

💬 Reflection Questions

• Can I name what I'm waiting to learn?

• Have I taken any action in the last two weeks to gather that information?

These four career lessons came from four different teachers over the last month: a curious coyote thriving at the edges, a misunderstood plant finding their ideal habitat, an old tree that isn’t afraid to experiment, and an impressively patient Heron.

Each one was unaware of how I was perceiving them. They weren’t second-guessing the strategy that works for them because someone else used a different one. They were completely absorbed in doing what they do best under their current conditions.

I think that’s the best career advice of all, really.

📚 Further Reading

💬 Your Turn

If something in nature caught your attention this month, leave a comment or photo to share it with everyone else!

Below, you’ll find:

~ 4 ecological observations I’ve stumbled upon

~ how each connects back to work

~ prompts to explore the thinking further

Field Note #1

📍 Location: Mendocino Botanical Garden

🔎 Observation

See this woolly bear caterpillar perched upon a prickly pear cactus? (say that 3x fast)

At first, I thought it was an odd food source. But, after watching for a few minutes, I realized it wasn’t munching on it. It was using an available structure, even an unexpected one, to meet its seasonal needs: shelter, elevation, and safe passage.

🌀 Career Lesson

Organisms don’t just interact with their environment as “food/not food”. They get creative and consider the larger picture of what they need most right now.

Instead of asking:
→ Is this job good/not good?

Try asking:
→ What do I need my environment to provide right now?

A job can provide simultaneous functions:
🛡️ Shelter - from pressure while you recover or build something on the side
📍 Elevation - gives you perspective, networks, credentials
🚪 Passage - provides access to other opportunities or people

And, just as important, a job won’t provide every function. The caterpillar wasn’t getting nutrition, comfort, or long-term habitat from that cactus.

But, I bet it’ll be looking for those things come spring.

Field Note #2

📍 Location: Golden Gate Park

🔎 Observation

Following a long week of rain in January, mushrooms were popping up everywhere in the park. Most often, you’ll find them on or near trees.

In nutrient-poor soil (Golden Gate Park was built on top of sand dunes), plants partner with mycorrhizal fungi to extend the reach of their roots for water and minerals. In return, the fungi's paycheck comes in the form of carbohydrates.

🌀 Career Lesson

There’s a concept called mutualism where two different species form a close partnership and benefit by exchanging goods (like food) or services (like protection). When soil becomes more fertile, and the plant no longer needs what the fungi provide, the payment of carbs to the fungi comes at the cost of the plant's ability to grow.

This change in conditions has caused the mutualism to drift toward parasitism.

In your career, whether it is an employer, mentor, collaborator, or client, pay attention to when conditions change.

You get to pick which benefits (money, learning, access, autonomy, meaning, time, etc.) matter to you and the cost they are worth to you.

And, you should reevaluate when the conditions change.

Field Note #3

📍 Location: Land’s End Trail

🔎 Observation

I was struck by how this Monterey Cypress seemed to be sticking straight out of the hillside. Shaped by the wind, unstable soil, and salt air of coastal cliffsides, these trees often grow horizontally before reaching for the sky.

🌀 Career Lesson

In careers, on resumes, and during job interviews, we tend to highlight upward mobility: promotions, broader scope, and clear titles.

But the detours, experiments, plateaus, and even pauses are often where your most important skills are built. They change how you lead, decide, and relate.

Nyam Adodoadji writes beautifully about this type of career expansion, sharing:

“My titles varied, but through these seasons that appeared as cracks in my career, my leadership and personal growth rooted and blossomed. It’s through these seasons that I gained nuance, skill, courage, and emotional intelligence.”

In the moment, this kind of sideways growth can feel uncertain. Later, you realize you were building stability, range, and self-trust.

Field Note #4

📍 Location: Rocks collected from Ocean Beach

🔎 Observation

When I’m walking Wally on the beach, I always keep an eye out for rocks with white lines. The lines are evidence of a time each one fractured, allowing minerals to slowly settle into the cracks.

🌀 Career Lesson

Careers can have “fractures” (growth, burnout, pivots, u-turns, uncertainty) too. If you step back far enough to arrange the pieces into a whole, you can spot the throughline running through seemingly unrelated chapters.

When you’re trying to find the throughline of your work, don’t look for a consistent title. Look for the problem you keep trying to solve, especially after pressure rearranges your life.

For me, I keep coming back to the question: How can I create conditions for growth?

I’ve asked this question inside companies in people ops and talent roles, while consulting on compensation design, in 1:1 conversations with people searching for their throughline, in my newsletter dedicated to this question, while creating a seasonal career framework, and, yes, even quite literally in gardens.

💬 Prompts to explore further

I’d love it if you share in the comments:

• What “function” is your current job serving? (shelter / elevation / passage / stability / community / something else)

• What’s one chapter of sideways growth you’re proud of?

• Find your throughline. Reflecting on your career, what question(s) do you keep returning to?

• What did you observe in nature this month? Share a photo of something that caught your eye + the lesson you see in it (or I can help find the lesson!)

If you’ve made it this far, you have:

1. Learned about my career burnout despite working with the best (Part 1)

2. Identified your Season of Work (Part 2)

3. Assessed whether your work environment supports or strains it (Part 3)

4. And possibly felt seen, stuck, or somewhere in between...

Which brings us to the final bridge between reflection and action.

For all my talk about cycles and non-linear approaches, I’ll bring us back to where we started: my career journey.

I moved (back) to San Francisco last September.

Right as Eric, Wally, and I settled into our rental in the Outer Sunset, I started a garden educator program with a teaching garden in my neighborhood. My cohort would snuggle into an outdoor classroom with worn and weathered benches. Something I took away from that program was that a lot of the people who came and taught us got their start at their non-profit or public benefit org by volunteering.

I started volunteering at Middle Lake in Golden Gate Park because it is where I walk my dog nearly every day. It is a loop celebrated by long wooden benches with small plaques remembering loved ones.

Benches have shown up at key moments in my past year: the teaching garden, around Middle Lake, and one behind the local bookstore where I first discovered a lush, layered garden that would eventually lead to my new job.

They’ve been my quiet collaborators, inviting me to be still, take in my surroundings, and not decide yet. Finding work that fit both my skills and my season took longer than I’d imagined. I often felt awkward, embarrassed, and not quite sure how to answer ‘what have you been up to?’.

Looking back, I was deep in a Fall Season: full of reassessment, boundary setting, and letting go. And even when it looked like nothing was happening, growth was happening beneath the surface.

Almost nine months later, I’ve just started a part-time job with a local landscape design company. I’m working on the business and admin side, supporting a team I admire. I first reached out to the owner in January after stumbling upon that magical garden she designed behind the neighborhood bookstore.

At the same time, something else was quietly growing.

In the months leading up to the new role, I’d been building something creative and conceptual: this Substack, the Career Ecology Framework, and the group and 1:1 sessions that have grown from it. It’s been a slow process of layering, combining grounded, outdoor work with operational, systems-focused work.

Aligned work doesn’t always arrive as a single role or title. Sometimes, it looks like tucking a buckwheat in on a rainy day and processing it through writing. I didn’t pick one identity over the other; I made space for both.

Next up in this post, I’ll walk you through small, practical experiments you can try depending on what season you’re in. You don’t need to try them all, pick one that resonates with where you are right now and see what shifts. This is where the framework gets actionable and increasingly specific.

The goal isn’t to take massive action, it’s to take the right action. It’s about taking the right risk at the right time because you’re matching the energy of your season, not the urgency of a capitalist work culture.

And if you want help designing your next season, I offer 1:1 Career Ecology sessions. We’ll map out your current season of work, assess your work environment, and co-create small, sustainable steps toward work that actually fits. Just hit reply if you’re reading this in your inbox, or message me on Substack for more info.

🌱 Spring

Overview

Something is beginning to stir. You’re not committing yet, but you’re paying attention. This season is about exploring new ideas, testing small experiments, and following threads of interest without overthinking. Clarity doesn’t come from sitting still. It comes from trying, noticing, and adjusting as you go.

Your core needs in Spring:

Season-Aligned Experiments:

• Own a small project: Start something low-risk at work or in your community that aligns with what you're curious about.

• Learn in public: Launch a mini content series on LinkedIn or Substack. Keep it time-bound (4–6 weeks) so it’s lightweight but real.

• Take a class: Try something with zero connection to your career. Stretch your brain sideways and see what ideas shake loose.

• Refine your role: Clarify your priorities, propose trade-offs, or renegotiate timelines to give yourself necessary breathing room.

• Volunteer: Join for a one-off volunteer day with a local organization that sparks your interest and gives you new perspective. Show up, help out, observe.

• Build community: DM three people whose careers intrigue you and ask one thoughtful and specific question. No agenda, just genuine interest.

☀️ Summer

Overview

Now you’re in motion. Ideas are clicking, energy is high, and your work is gaining traction. This season is about building on your momentum by deepening your expertise, owning your lane, and strengthening relationships. It’s tempting to say yes to everything, but focus on what matters most.

Your core needs in Summer:

Season-Aligned Experiments:

• Run point on something big: Take ownership of a project that stretches and showcases your skills.

• Teach what you know: Host a workshop, write a playbook, or mentor someone earlier in their journey.

• Refine your role: Identify what’s working, what’s wasting time, and make a pitch to reshape your job around areas where you excel.

• Form a mastermind group: Start a monthly meeting with 3-4 peers to exchange feedback, encouragement, and resources.

• Raise your hand to speak: Share your expertise at an industry meet-up, pitch a talk, join a panel, or present at an internal meeting to boost your visibility.

• Build in breaks: Experiment with productivity tools or methods to sustain your creativity without burnout.

Subscribe now

🍂 Fall

Overview

Things are shifting. What used to work may not anymore. This season is about stepping back to reassess, ask hard questions, and let go of what no longer fits. You’re pruning with purpose, refining your focus, and creating space for what’s next to take root.

Your core needs in Fall:

Season-Aligned Experiments:

• Do a ruthless audit: Evaluate current roles or projects honestly, deciding which to let go. Ask yourself, “Can I do what I’m already doing, differently?”. There's power in subtle recalibration

• Get real feedback: Ask 2–3 trusted people, “What would you come to me for?” (aka “What am I great at?”)

• Write it down: Reflect on your experiences, insights, and evolving priorities weekly. Schedule it so it happens.

• Step back: Join a short retreat, workshop, or even a structured solo day to gain perspective on what matters to you most.

• Plan a sabbatical or break: Book the break now, even if it’s a long weekend. Waiting until you’re burnt out is too late.

• Redefine your boundaries: Update the people around you on what you’re no longer available for. If you don’t say it, they’ll assume nothing’s changed.

❄️ Winter

Overview

You’ve stepped back, and that pause is intentional. This season is for recovery, reflection, and quiet repair. You’re not producing or planning. You’re resting, recharging, and slowly reconnecting with what matters. Protect your energy and trust that stillness is a necessary part of sustainable growth.

Your core needs in Winter:

Season-Aligned Experiments:

• Rest like it’s your job: Schedule real, deliberate downtime daily or weekly, protecting it from disruptions.

• Do low-input reflection: Go for a walk. Sit with a notebook. Listen to the birds chirp. Let ideas come to you instead of forcing insight.

• Learn quietly: Queue up podcasts, audiobooks, or articles. No pressure to apply what you hear, just absorb what resonates.

• Slash your to-do list: Temporarily scale back responsibilities and communicate clearly about your capacity.

• Nurture key relationships: Support your most meaningful relationships through relaxed, low-effort interactions. Stay connected without needing to perform.

• Sketch loose plans: Outline general, “maybe next”, pressure-free ideas for your next steps without immediate action.

We’re taught to equate movement with momentum and progress with productivity. We celebrate new beginnings more than intentional endings. However, the shifts that matter most and that quietly redirect our work and ways of being tend to be slow, quiet, and hard to measure.

What I’ve learned, and what I hope this framework helps you see, is that your career doesn’t have to follow a tidy, linear plotline. It can move like a season, looping and layering. You can learn to follow your own internal calendar and have that alone be your marker for success.

So let the season be what it is. And if you’re not sure where to begin, go sit on a bench for a while.

Two ways I can help:

1️⃣ DM: Feeling in between seasons or want to ask a question specific to your life and experiences? Send a DM my way.

2️⃣ 1:1 Coaching: Feeling burnt out, interested in exploring a career change, or just plain stuck? I work 1:1 with people to go through Career Ecology Framework together and design work that feels right for your season. Book an intro call here.

💬 Share in the comments

Option 1: What season are you in and what is one seasonally aligned action you plan to try this month?

Option 2: What would you want a bench plaque to say about you?

Option 3: Answer both! Or, share anything you’d like!

• Part 1: A Framework for Sustainable Work

• Part 2: What Season of Work Are You In?

• Part 3: Does Your Environment Support Your Season? (this post!)

• Part 4: A Career Season Field Guide With 24 Experiments

🌿 Let’s Review: What is the Career Ecology Framework?

A tool to support more sustainable career decisions by understanding your internal cycles (your seasons) and whether your external environment (your workplace) supports the season you are currently in.

It blends self-awareness + environmental assessment so people stop trying to "fix themselves" and start shaping work that actually fits.

⚙️ How do I use the Framework?

The framework builds on itself:

1. Identify Your Season

   Understand your current needs before making a change. We did this in What Season of Work Are You In?

2. Assess Your Environment

   Use those needs to evaluate where your current job supports, or strains, you. We’ll do this next! 👇

3. Cultivate, Prune, or Compost

   Pick a seasonally aligned action to see if you can get closer to alignment.

4. Sow New Seeds

   What did you learn? Is your current environment still the right one?

Let’s Assess Your Environment

Now that I’ve triple-checked I haven’t written asses we can dive in. On that note, I’ll let you in on the backend of how I organize the seasons. The top 6 influences on how we feel about work are:

• Autonomy        • Growth       • Stability
• Collaboration   • Capacity     • Meaning

Every season comes with different variations. In Spring, you want more growth and autonomy. In Winter, you are looking for stability and rest.

Friction often comes when your season and environment are mismatched. Below, you’ll go through an exercise to identify any points of tension and get more specific. The outcome will look something like “My current job offers autonomy and meaning but lacks stability and belonging.”

⬇️ Skip ahead to the Season you identified

We will use the needs of your season to prioritize what you need from your environment today.

• Spring 🌱

• Summer ☀️

• Fall 🍂

• Winter ❄️

Spring

🌱 “Something is starting.”

Keywords: Experimentation, curiosity, attention, stimulating, false starts

✏️ Assessment Tool: Spring Season <> Environment

Use the prompts below to get more specific and ask: Is this need being met in a way that supports my current season?

You're not being graded, and your responses are private.

1. Growth

2. Autonomy

3. Capacity

4. Meaning

5. Stability

6. Collaboration

7. Review

Where is your work environment meeting your seasonal needs? And, where is it lacking?

• Sample output: “I’m getting a lot of growth opportunities, but I don’t have the autonomy to explore them freely.”

→ Hop ahead for Next Steps

Summer

☀️ “I’m in it.”

Keywords: Momentum, expansion, productivity, visibility

✏️ Assessment Tool: Summer Season <> Environment

Use the prompts below to get more specific and ask: Is this need being met in a way that supports my current season?

You're not being graded, and your responses are private.

1. Growth

2. Collaboration

3. Autonomy

4. Meaning

5. Capacity

6. Stability

7. Review

Where is your work environment meeting your seasonal needs? And, where is it lacking?

• Sample output: “My current job offers autonomy and meaning but lacks stability and belonging.”

Hop ahead for Next Steps →

Fall

🍂 “Is this still right?”

Keywords: Evaluation, fatigue, harvesting, boundary-setting

✏️ Assessment Tool: Fall Season <> Environment

Use the prompts below to get more specific and ask: Is this need being met in a way that supports my current season?

You're not being graded, and your responses are private.

1. Meaning

2. Stability

3. Capacity

4. Collaboration

5. Autonomy

6. Growth

7. Review

Where is your work environment meeting your seasonal needs? And, where is it lacking?

• Sample output: “There’s stability here, but I’m questioning the meaning behind what I’m producing.”

Hop ahead for Next Steps →

Winter

❄️ “Let it rest.”

Keywords: Stillness, recovery, integration, composting

✏️ Assessment Tool: Winter Season <> Environment

Use the prompts below to get more specific and ask: Is this need being met in a way that supports my current season?

You're not being graded, and your responses are private.

1. Capacity

2. Stability

3. Meaning

4. Collaboration

5. Autonomy

6. Growth

7. Review

Where is your work environment meeting your seasonal needs? And, where is it lacking?

• Sample output: “My job is stable but constantly asks for more capacity than I have right now.”

Hop ahead for Next Steps →

Next Steps

Phew! You just named where your work is supporting you, and where it might be creating strain. Once you have this strategic clarity, you can stop spinning and make grounded, intentional choices.

In the next post, we’ll do this by moving from reflection to action. I walk you through small, strategic experiments based on your season. Not vague advice like “find your passion,” but real, testable ways to move forward.

Two ways I can help:

1️⃣ DM: Feeling in between seasons or want to ask a question specific to your life and experiences? Send a DM my way.

2️⃣ 1:1 Coaching: Feeling burnt out, interested in exploring a career change, or just plain stuck? I work 1:1 with people to go through Career Ecology Framework together and design work that feels right for your season. Book an intro call here.

💬 Share in the comments

• Copy/paste: ‘I’m in a season of ___, but my environment is built for ___.’

• What did you learn about your current season or your environment?

• Which need felt the most unmet or the most surprisingly supported?

• What’s one small thing you might adjust based on what you noticed?

• Did you make it through the whole post? 😂
  
  

• Part 1: A Framework for Sustainable Work

• Part 2: What Season of Work Are You In? (this post!)

• Part 3: Does Your Environment Support Your Season?

• Part 4: A Career Season Field Guide With 24 Experiments

Right Plant, Right Place

A few weeks ago, I worked in a west-facing garden in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco. The garden is in a spot where the salt air clings on and the wind comes in hard off the Pacific, especially in spring and summer.

Tucked in the shadow of a fence was a small Ceanothus, planted in a patch of dappled shade that probably felt like a safe choice. But it looked scraggly with brittle branches and little leaves. It had been straining outward and upward, for sunshine it could never quite reach.

Seeing this, I remembered a core gardening principle: Right Plant, Right Place.

Ceanothus is a tough, sun-loving plant. It thrives in the kind of dry, sandy soil and coastal wind that would flatten something more delicate. So I moved it a few feet over to an open patch near the walkway. And within weeks, it transformed.

A lot of us are like that Ceanothus.

We feel stunted, stuck, or strangely unmotivated. Not because we’re unambitious or incapable, but because we’re trying to grow in conditions that don’t support us. We spend so much time trying to “fix” ourselves by developing better habits, being more productive, toughening up, when the real issue might be the soil we’re in.

The Career Ecology Framework is built on that idea. I’ve been using it to make more sustainable career decisions by understanding my current needs (Right Plant) and whether my external environment (Right Place) supports that.

Instead of chasing growth, it helps us name what we need right now, assess whether our environment supports it, experiment with small adjustments, and recognize when it might be time to replant.

It moves from inward awareness → outward evaluation → intentional next steps.

What Season Are You In? (Take the Quiz)

Before assessing your ecosystem and understanding how to make aligned changes, you have to understand what you need in this season of your career.

Every season comes with different needs. In a Spring season, you’ll be looking for more growth, autonomy, and permission to explore. In a Winter season, you are looking for more stability and rest.

I recently ran a workshop on the Framework and here are a few of the reactions:

• “I feel seen. This is a great framework and so accurate.”

• ”As a generally lost person - I found this to provide lots of clarity and support.”

I hope the same happens for you! 👇

Take the quiz

Below are 7 questions to understand how you are experiencing work today. At the end, you’ll be matched with a season based on how these needs show up.

Write down the letter of the experience that feels most true for you today. There are no right answers, and don’t overthink it!

1. Right now, when it comes to autonomy at work…

• A. I’m itching for more control to shape what’s next.

• B. I feel empowered and trusted to set direction.

• C. I feel like I’ve lost some autonomy and need to reassess.

• D. I want space and distance, no new pressure.

2. Right now, when it comes to collaboration at work…

• A. I want gentle collaborators or creative peers to bounce ideas off.

• B. I’m fueled by being part of something exciting.

• C. I’m feeling a little distant and rethinking who I want to work with.

• D. I want closeness without pressure or performance.

3. Right now, when it comes to growth at work…

• A. I’d love to test out a new idea or skill. I’m looking for small ways to stretch.

• B. I’m applying things I’ve recently learned. And finding it expansive.

• C. I’m focused on refining core skills. I find myself saying ‘no’ more than ‘yes’.

• D. I need space to just be and recover before I take on anything new.

4. Right now, when it comes to capacity at work…

• A. I feel up and down, rushed but excited. I want to try things out.

• B. I'm energized, focused, and getting a lot done.

• C. I’m running low. I’m trying to prioritize where I can.

• D. I’m completely drained. I need time to recover.

5. Right now, when it comes to stability at work…

• A. I can handle some uncertainty if it means new possibilities.

• B. I feel grounded enough to take bold steps.

• C. I’m craving more structure and predictability.

• D. I need calm, predictability, and as few unknowns as possible.

6. Right now, when it comes to meaning at work…

• A. I sense something meaningful might emerge, but it’s not clear yet.

• B. I feel aligned with the purpose of my work.

• C. I’m questioning the value or impact of what I’m doing.

• D. I feel disconnected, but I’m tuning into what matters internally.

7. Right now, what description of work feels most appealing?

• A. Emerging energy, curiosity, experimentation, rebuilding.

• B. Momentum, growth, and forward motion.

• C. Reflection, integration, realignment.

• D. Rest, pause, space to breathe.

Got Your Letters? Let’s Find Your Season

• Mostly A’s → Spring

• Mostly B’s → Summer

• Mostly C’s → Fall

• Mostly D’s → Winter

Note: If your results were mixed, you might be shifting between seasons. That’s normal, and that tension in itself can be confusing. The goal here is to name what season feels most true for you today.

Your Season, Explained

Based on your responses, you’ve landed in a season of Spring / Summer / Fall / Winter.

Identifying your season isn’t about labeling yourself. It’s about understanding your current career phase to make better choices about what to focus on, what to let go of, and what kind of support to prioritize. It gives us a shared language to reflect the different energetic and emotional states people experience in their careers.

Below is a short description of each season—what it might feel like, what it’s asking of you, and where your energy is likely focused. In the next post, we’ll investigate how to work with that season and what to do if your current environment doesn’t match it.

Spring 🌱

Spring feels like the return of curiosity after a long stretch of quiet. You’re not totally clear on what’s next, but you want to explore. It might show up as bursts of energy, random ideas, or the urge to say “yes” to things that aren’t fully logical yet. There’s this sense of possibility again, and that in itself feels like momentum.

What helps: giving yourself permission to try things without committing to them. Light structure. New inputs. Being around people or ideas that spark something.

What strains: pressure to have a fully formed plan. Deadlines. Treating it like you need to be “back” already. That shuts down the experimentation before it even has a chance to take root.

Summer ☀️

Summer is the doing season. You’re feeling traction around a job, a project, or a clear goal, and you’re in motion. You’re executing, producing, and showing up. You feel aligned and energized.

What helps: having time, energy, and even attention boundaries. You need support systems and recovery woven into your week. Because there’s forward motion, it’s easy to overdo it.

What strains: the idea that just because it’s working, you have to double down. Overcommitting. Letting urgency win. Forgetting to pause. You can’t bloom all the time.

Fall 🍂

Fall can be one of the hardest seasons to name, because from the outside, things often look stable or successful. But inside, there’s a slow unraveling. You start to feel detached from things that used to light you up. Your clarity gets murky. You’re asking bigger questions that don’t have quick answers.

What helps: space. Time to reflect, journal, walk, read things that deepen rather than distract. Being able to acknowledge what’s no longer working without having to immediately fix it.

What strains: external pressure to stay on the path, keep pushing, hold it all together. When you don’t give yourself room to notice what’s ending or to feel uncertain, you get stuck.

Winter ❄️

Winter is stillness. Sometimes it’s chosen, like a sabbatical or a break, and sometimes it’s not. Maybe you’re recovering from burnout, or a loss, or the slow depletion that comes from pushing for too long. It can feel disorienting, especially if you’re used to defining yourself by what you produce.

What helps: predictability. Slowness. Gentle routines. Fewer decisions. People who don’t expect a lot from you. Letting yourself be in the season without rushing to spring forward.

What strains: guilt. The belief that if you’re not productive, you’re falling behind. Or that rest needs to be earned. But growth is happening, it’s just underground.

Up Next: Aligning Your Needs With Your Environment

So now you’ve got a season. And maybe it feels spot on. Or, maybe it feels like a not-quite-nameable edge between seasons. That’s okay. The point isn’t to get the “right” answer. It’s to start noticing the patterns of what’s shifting, what’s calling for more attention, and what no longer fits.

Because once you name where you are, everything else makes more sense. You stop trying to bloom when you’re meant to be resting. Or waiting around for clarity when you actually need to take action.

In the next post, we’ll look at how your season affects what you need from your work environment and how to tell if your current environment is helping or holding you back.

Two ways I can help:

1️⃣ DM: Feeling in between seasons or want to ask a question specific to your life and experiences? Send a DM my way.

2️⃣ 1:1 Coaching: Feeling burnt out, interested in exploring a career change, or just plain stuck? I work 1:1 with people to go through Career Ecology Framework together and design work that feels right for your season. Book an intro call here.

Share in the comments

I’d love to know: What season are you in?

Other things to talk about in the comments:

• Are you clearly in one season, or somewhere between two?

• What part of your season description feels most true?

• In the next post, do you think you’ll discover that your environment is supporting or straining your current needs?

• Anything that comes to mind!

New here? This is part of a 4-part series:

• Part 1: A Framework for Sustainable Work (this post!)

• Part 2: What Season of Work Are You In?

• Part 3: Does Your Environment Support Your Season?

• Part 4: A Career Season Field Guide With 24 Experiments

What if we stopped treating our careers like ladders and started tending to them like ecosystems: cyclical and in relationship with their environment?

Two years ago, in May, I found myself standing in the middle of a client’s freshly weeded garden bed dripping with sweat and tired in the good way.

I felt more myself than I had in years.

The job I’d just left with Elpha had been mission-driven with exceptional leadership, full of kind people, and generous autonomy. But I still fell into a cycle of burnout and needed to reset.

For a long time, I believed the burnout meant I hadn’t found the right job yet. I turned the blame inward and told myself I was the problem. I was too idealistic about what work could look like, too impatient. I felt a lot of sadness because the work we were doing at Elpha was so important, but I still felt wrong inside of it. It was disorienting and more common than I think we talk about.

But the longer I spent searching and thinking about what I actually wanted, the more I realized:

There isn’t a right job. But perhaps there is a right relationship to work for different seasons of my life.

Maybe what I needed wasn’t a better match. I needed a better model.

The Meaning behind the ‘Right’ Job

I started to notice it wasn’t just me rethinking my relationship to work. Friends, clients, and coworkers were feeling stuck in the same pattern and beating ourselves up instead of admitting that what we needed might be redirection, rest, or even release.

I’m not sure I can say it (anything!) better than Anne Helen Petersen:

“We are living under duress but with more relative ease and wealth than any other point in human history. We are waking up every morning and trying to figure out how to make a life: how to orient ourselves towards what matters, and what that even is.”

As Petersen and Labor Journalist Sarah Jaffe have both argued, our generation was sold the myth that the right job, pursued with enough passion and resilience, would lead to steady success and deep fulfillment.

When we believe our jobs are our primary source of meaning, we're more likely to:

• Ignore and suppress the signs of burnout

• Accept low pay and long hours because "we're doing meaningful work"

• Blame ourselves (whoops!) for the dissatisfaction, rather than questioning the structures around us

When we stop allowing work to be our primary source of identity and meaning, we can start to imagine healthier models for growth.

What Nature Teaches Us About Growth

So I started looking for more stories and models about alternative, even contrary, approaches to growth.

I was looking for a model that could hold the pendulums I was experiencing. One that accounted for them, rather than looked down on them. And one of the oldest, clearest models comes from our sweet, sweet earth. 🌎

That’s when I came across a teaching from Heȟáka Sápa (Black Elk), a holy man of the Oglala Lakota people, that reframed everything for me. While describing how everything in the natural world moves in circles–the sun, the moon, the seasons, the ways his people built their homes and communities–he said:

“The power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were.”

Reading this, I felt something unlock.

The way we’ve been taught to think about careers as linear paths of constant growth is outdated, unsustainable, and disconnected from how natural growth works.

Plants bloom in specific seasons that best meet their needs. Forests require periods of rest, shedding, and even controlled burns to regenerate (don’t read this as set your career on fire. Or, maybe do!). In nature, dormancy isn’t lazy or unconventional. It’s part of a healthy cycle.

What if we let our careers grow the way ecosystems do? What if we had language to more objectively evaluate our internal environments and how our external environments influence them?

Not the throw-pillow version of trust the season you’re in, but a grounded, practical framework based on the emotional and professional cycles we all move through. A tool to support recognizing what type of work environment will meet your current needs vs. what you think you should want.

An Alternative Way to Think About Work, Borrowed from Ecology

This is the goal behind the Career Ecology Framework.

Rather than treating our relationship to work as a ladder to climb, it aims to account for careers as living systems. In reality, our relationship to work moves in cycles: seasons of renewal, momentum, questioning, and stillness.

The Career Ecology Framework has given me language to distinguish between:

• My internal experience (season)

• My external context (ecosystem)

• The relationship between them (match or mismatch)

And with this framing, I’ve been inching closer to an internal steadiness that helps me move through changes proactively, not reactively.

My hope is that recognizing what season you are currently in will make you a better and more sustainable career strategist. That it can help give you language to identify when you're in the wrong ecosystem and lead to action, small or big, to change that.

Up Next…

In the next post, learn more about the four seasons of the Career Ecology Framework and how to recognize which one you are currently in or moving toward.

Want to talk about this live?

If something in this post resonated with you, I’d love for you to join me in a live session called Find Your Fit: Reshaping Your Work, Not Yourself.

The deets:

• 🔥 Hosted by: Campout, a digital community for creative marketers and the creative curious. The crew at Bonfire lovingly cares for this community.

• 📆 Join live: Wednesday, May 7 @ 12pm EST

• 💌 RSVP: here!

For the Comments

💬 I’m curious: If you had to guess, what season do you think you’re in right now?