The Harvest Season of Your Own Life

Outside, the season is turning. The light shifts its angle.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the autumn days are shorter; early mornings and evenings are cooler; we watch the trees and vegetation change colour; and fields are being walked, gathered, and cleared. The big harvest machines are out and slowing the traffic on rural roads, but, we are okay with a little bit of slow driving.

Harvest is not a time for planting. It is a time for recognizing what has already grown. Many of us are grateful for being witness to the abundance in growth.

Your encore chapter is asking something very similar of you.

Accumulating Is Not the Same as Growing

For most of your professional life, "more" was the measure — more scope, more responsibility, more proof that you belonged in the room. For our generation of women, that instinct didn't just shape how we worked; it shaped how we defined success. And it built something genuinely impressive — not just for yourself, but for the people around you, too. You have every right to be proud of what you've created. The awards, the recognition, the hard-won accolades — all of it well-deserved.

Our encore chapter comes with a caution: Built on the same instinct, simply accumulating in a new direction, our encore feels like the same treadmill in a more elegant setting. A new title. A new role. A new certification to justify the next move. The question underneath all of it stays the same: what more do I need to prove?

Harvesting asks a different question entirely: what is already ripe in everything I have lived?

What Is Already Ripe

The strategic clarity that you built while balancing competing priorities. The steadiness you developed when a room needed someone calm. The judgment you earned the hard way, through decisions that did not unfold as planned. None of this requires a new credential to be real. The only recognition that counts, is yours.

This is the heart of what Connie Zweig describes in The Inner Work of Age as the movement from role to soul. The role asked what you could achieve. The soul asks what you have come to know. Your history is not a limitation on your future. It is your richest source material.

The Field Between Roles

Most of the discomfort in a woman's encore chapter lives in the in-between: no longer defined by the role you left, not yet settled into what comes next. We are tempted to treat that stretch as a gap to fill quickly with the next plan.

Consider a gentler reading and reframing. The in-between is not empty time. It is where the harvesting actually happens, because it is the first moment in years with enough distance from the old role to see clearly what was substance and what was scaffolding.

What You Leave in the Field

A true harvest is discerning. Not everything from your high-achiever professional life deserves to be carried forward. The habit of being endlessly available. The identity built around being the one who handles everything. The belief that your worth is measured by productivity and results (efficient outcomes). These beliefs served a purpose once but do not belong in your next chapter simply because you already own them.

A clear-out asks what to throw away. A harvest asks what is worth the care of keeping, refining, and using well. Some might think this is scarcity thinking. I have been there and grappled with the concept and my beliefs. I now see the concept of clearing as a more discerning kind of abundance.

A Harvest Practice for This Week

Set aside twenty quiet minutes and write two short lists.

1. Ready to gather: List three things you know how to do well because you lived them, not because you studied them. Catch yourself when you give credit to your accumulation of certifications and awards. Give more credit to your lived experienced.
2. Left in the field: List one habit or belief you are ready to stop carrying. Honestly assess what this habit or belief has quietly been costing you.

Choose one item from the first list and let it serve you this week, without adding a single new commitment to your calendar.

This harvest is not a way of looking backward and being amazed at who you have been, what you have accomplished, or lament for those days. This harvest is about gathering only what you need to move forward well toward who you are becoming.

This work continues inside the Executive Encore Network for Women. In the Encore Strategy Studio, The September Reflective helped members sort what is real from what is inherited:

• Where Purpose Went Quiet — locating the gap between busy and purposeful (three questions, including "am I reigniting a purpose, or a persona?"
• Role to Soul Inventory — separating identity from title, naming which of the five "shadows of age" is active right now (denial, attachment to the old identity, over-identification with doing, unfinished business, fear)
• Redefine Success, Encore-Style — rewriting the scorecard in her own terms
• Q4 Aligned Priorities / 12-Week Plan Reset — turning insight into three real priorities and a next honest step for each
• Evaluate Your Network — which relationships still serve the old role vs. the one she's becoming
• One Small, Courageous Action — a single values-aligned commitment for the week

The Encore Integration Circle invited members to bring those decisions into the room that has earned their trust. The Encore Book Club continues in the last week of September with a review of how The Pivot Year and The Inner Work of Age grounds and supports their work in their Executive Encore.

In October, we turn to Courageous Conversations, because some of what we leave in the field will need to be said aloud.

You do not have to harvest everything at once. You only have to walk into one field this week and see what is ready.

Learn more about the Executive Encore Network for Women below. Or take the first step of subscribing to the Encore Newsletter to access occasional complimentary Insights, Guides, Practices, and Reflective Compendiums that are only available to members of the Executive Encore Network for Women.