The Season Will Turn: What Spring Teaches Leaders About Difficult Seasons

Sometimes we actively wait for spring, taking notice of how far away it is, longing for winter to be over. Other times it comes as a surprise. This year, I'd settled into winter so fully that the cold, short days started to feel like the norm, and I'd stopped waiting for anything to change. So when spring finally arrived, it caught me off guard. That's the trap worth naming: the longer we sit inside a season, the easier it is to mistake it for permanent — whether or not we're glad to see it end.

For leaders, spring is worth pausing on for more than its scenery. It's one of the clearest natural metaphors for something every leader eventually lives through: the long, grey stretch of a difficult season — a stalled project, a restructure, a loss of trust on a team — and the disorienting sense, while you're in it, that it might never end.

When that hard project does finally end, or the team finally shifts out of a rut, they rarely with spring's uncomplicated relief, though. They come with new demands, new uncertainty, and sometimes even a real sense of loss for what the old season cost to get through. The season turning isn't always the same as the season turning out well.

When winter feels permanent

Anyone who has led through a hard season knows how 'cold' it can really get. It isn't only the workload. It's the fog that settles in when a project that once felt exciting now feels like a slog, or when the team's energy has gone flat, or the metrics that used to move in your favour stop moving at all.

I hit that fog myself this past winter. A couple of major disappointments left me needing to pull away and go into my shell for a while. In the middle of it, a quiet pessimism crept in — not despair, but a conviction that this is simply how things are now, and how they'll stay.

May spring remind you, as it did me, how that conviction is almost always wrong — a distortion, not a diagnosis. The hard stretch of a project is real, but it's a stretch, not a destination.

Impermanence, in two ancient traditions

Buddhism has a precise term for this: anicca, or impermanence — one of the tradition's foundational marks of existence (Lion's Roar; Access to Insight). It's presented not as comfort but as a basic fact: every condition that arises also passes away, and clinging to any state as fixed is what produces so much of our suffering. Applied to leadership, the teaching asks you to hold the hard season as what it is: a condition that arose, and will therefore pass.

Christianity carries an older version of the same idea. In the Bible, Ecclesiastes 3 opens with a line most people can half-recite without knowing its source: "For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven" (Bible Hub). This passage goes on to list opposites — a time to plant and to harvest, to cry and to laugh, to tear down and to build up — not as sentiment but as a description of how life is structured. Seasons turn and that's the order of things.

Two very different traditions arrive independently at the same conclusion: nothing in this earthly life holds its shape forever, including the hard thing you're in the middle of right now.

What this means on a Tuesday, mid-project

What shifts in your relationship to the present difficulty, once you genuinely believe that the season will turn, is that you stop mistaking a phase for a verdict - a quarter of low morale, a launch gone sideways, or a team that's lost its spark. None of it is a final judgement on you or the work. It's weather, not climate.

You get better at spotting change before it's obvious. Spring rarely arrives all at once — it shows up first in small signals, a slightly longer afternoon, one warm day among several cold ones, well before anyone would call it spring. The same is true of a project or a team: the first signs of a turn are usually small, and easy to dismiss if the cold has trained you to expect nothing else.

You lead differently in the depths of it. Knowing the season will change doesn't mean waiting with your arms folded — it means tending to what's still alive underneath, the relationships, the trust, the small wins, the way a gardener tends the soil in winter, trusting the bulbs are doing their quiet work even though nothing shows above ground yet.

The bottom line

Seasons come and go — true of the weather, and true of the hardest stretch you're leading your team through right now. Two of the world's oldest wisdom traditions reached the same conclusion from very different starting points, and both offer leaders the same instruction: this will change. So lead like someone who knows it, not like someone convinced the cold is all there is. Spring always comes. Keep leading until it does.

And reach out for support in the meantime if you need it.

Kathryn Martens

Book A Discovery Call