A few years ago, late August, I found myself doing something I have done every single year, and possibly in some form, forever.
I was sitting in the kitchen chatting to my kids, reminiscing on the summer holidays, and all the time whilst doing that I was mentally rebuilding myself for back to work, quietly assembling a ‘To Do’ list in my head. The back to it energy that September brings creating mild anxiety in my system. It was still a week before I was due back at work, yet part of me had already clocked back on, anticipating, remembering, reviewing.
For me, that’s because September is the time when the emails pick back up, the getting ready starts and somewhere an old switch flips: “Right, back to it”.
For a long time, I treated September like a second January, a chance to put down the slower, less polished Self that summer had allowed, and pick back up the sharper, work focused one. More disciplined and on top of everything, back to work, back to the gym, back to everything. I don’t do that any more, or at least, I catch myself doing it sooner than I used to. But I understand completely why so many of us still do, because I sit with people doing exactly this, every single September, in both the coaching room and the therapy room.
Before I write anything else I want to be clear.
The world’s demands are real.
The relentless demands of self, the pace of change, the uncertainty around work and money and technology, the sheer volume of what’s being asked of leaders, teams, and households right now is all genuine. I would never suggest otherwise, and I’d be doing you a disservice if I tried to talk you out of something that’s actually true.
But in my experience, it’s rarely the outside weather that breaks us. It’s the second layer that we quietly add on top of it, usually without ever deciding to.
The Second Layer
I think of that second layer as a part of us. In the language of Internal Family Systems, it is most likely a young, hardworking part, formed a long time ago. A part that learned safety comes through achievement, productivity, not failing, through never being the one who drops the ball.
Richard Schwartz, who developed Internal Family Systems, calls these parts “protectors” — formed to guard a more tender part of us, an “exile,” from ever being hurt again. The tragedy is that the protecting so often becomes its own kind of harm.
These inner parts have a job, and they take that job extremely seriously, they work very hard to keep you acceptable, ahead of the wave, valued and so on. They have unique messages for each of us. They have rarely been thanked, by us, for the work they do for us, and they have absolutely no idea how to stand down just because it’s September. Because they probably never learnt how to stand down.
That part, more often than any boss, client, or economic headline, is the hardest boss most of us will ever work for, and it’s ourselves.
It’s a part of us that raises the bar constantly. Some of you may know it as the Inner Critic, though in truth we have multiple inner critical parts. These inner parts are usually some form of old protector, still working from an outdated brief, that has never really been updated. It protects by persecuting and punishing us from the inside out.
Two Arrows
There’s a teaching I return to, from the Buddhist psychology thread of my training, that helps here more than almost anything else I know:
“Pain is what happens to us; suffering is the story we lay on top of it.”
Thich Nhat Hanh taught this as the parable of the two arrows. The first arrow is the pain itself, unavoidable and out of our hands. The second arrow is what we do to ourselves afterwards, the story we tell ourselves, the judgement, the “I should be coping better”. The first arrow we can’t dodge, but the second can be attended to because we’re the ones firing it.
In practice this means that the hard week is the pain, and the voice that says “I should be handling this better than I am”, is the story we add. And it’s that layer, not the week itself, that actually wears us down. Without awareness and inner work these parts run the show for us. We believe them to be true and necessary, we can’t quite rest because they are always there, and it’s far easier to rest a body than it is to rest a verdict.
There is a practice from core process work that I find myself teaching more than any technique or framework:
Before reaching for the fix, the reframe,
come back into the body,
and stay for a moment with what’s actually true.
Not-knowing isn’t a failure of coaching, or of leadership, or of life. September rewards the opposite instinct; certainty, momentum, a clean answer for everything, a plan by Friday. But the nervous system doesn’t reset because our calendars do. It resets through relational positive contact, from the comma, breath, pause. And we all know how hard that is to actually do alone.
Elder wisdom
As I approach my sixtieth year, I often think about what an elder version of me would do with a September like this one. An elder has usually done the quiet, unglamorous work of separating what the world is genuinely asking of them, from what they are asking of themselves on top of it, and has largely learned to put the second list down. I’ve witnessed it with some of the elders who guide me in my life and work. They have worked out how to tell the difference between the external weight that’s real and the internal weight they built themselves.
An elder walking into September doesn’t ask: What do I need to prove this year? They ask:
What is actually mine to carry, and what have I just been carrying out of habit, long after the reason for carrying it disappeared?
I can’t offer you a way to slow the pace of change. I wish I could quiet the news for you, or the genuine uncertainty in the world right now, or lighten the relentless demands on your time this autumn.
But the second weight, the one your hardworking young part built, I can help you with that, to build relationship with it and critically update it. This is the inner work of powerful leadership.
Just asking those parts of Self, in the way you might ask an exhausted colleague, what it’s so afraid will happen if it stood down for a while, can be helpful. It will likely respond with habitual old fears.
So, an invitation this September:
To just notice, with some curiosity, no judgement, and self-compassion, what you’re already carrying.
And to consider, which parts you might have permission to set down, without needing to earn that permission first.
Pema Chödrön has a line I think about often:
“Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.”
Maybe that’s what September asks of us, not to prove we’ve got it together, but to finally learn what our elders come to learn, how to change our own internal stories and update the file.
Feature Image Credit: Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash
