What Career Professionals Can Learn from Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Renata had worked in corporate communications for eight years, steadily climbing, always the reliable one on every team. After a reorganization left her doing two jobs' worth of work for months, she started dreading Monday mornings in a way that felt new. She kept telling herself this was just a busy season, that things would calm down, even as it stretched into its sixth month with no end in sight. On a flight home, exhausted and unable to focus on her laptop, she opened a book a coworker had mentioned, about wintering and hard seasons. Somewhere over the clouds, she recognized her situation: not a personal failing to push through, but a genuine low season that deserved to be named and tended rather than endured silently.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Naming a hard stretch instead of quietly grinding through it
Wintering's central move, naming a hard season honestly rather than hiding it, applies to a professional who feels behind but keeps performing as if nothing is wrong. Telling a manager that this stretch has been genuinely hard is not admitting incompetence; it is accurate information that can shape expectations more realistically.
In workplaces where naming difficulty is quietly held against someone at the next review cycle.
Name the hard stretch honestly to one trusted colleague or manager before it becomes a crisis.
Treating a lighter workload as recovery, not underperformance
The book treats withdrawing energy from ordinary demands as active recovery, not laziness, which a professional can apply by scaling back optional projects or extra visibility during a genuinely hard season. This is not coasting; it is protecting the capacity that core responsibilities require, rather than spreading thin energy across everything until quality slips everywhere at once.
In roles where visible extra effort is explicitly how advancement and recognition are earned.
Decline one optional project or committee this month and protect that time deliberately.
Finding real support instead of managing alone
May describes cold-climate communities that build gathering and lower expectations into their darkest months, offered as her own respectful account of specific traditions, not a template every workplace should copy. A professional can take the underlying idea, that hard seasons go better shared, by confiding in a mentor or peer rather than treating self-reliance as the only professional way through.
Competitive workplace cultures where colleagues are seen more as rivals than as potential support.
Tell one trusted colleague or mentor this month that the stretch has been genuinely hard.
Winter as metaphor, not a performance diagnosis
The book leans on winter and hibernation as a metaphor for hardship, not a scientific claim about why energy dips at particular times of year. Any mention connecting mood to daylight is one area of ongoing, evolving interest, not settled fact. What holds regardless of the calendar is the point underneath: a hard season passes, and does not define anyone's professional worth.
These ideas pull against each other in a real career. Naming a hard season honestly can invite scrutiny that makes scaling back optional work feel riskier, since a manager might read both together as declining commitment. Confiding in a mentor takes trust competitive workplaces do not always support. Most professionals manage a partial version of each, honest with one or two people, protecting some hours, while still meeting obligations that cannot be deferred until the season passes.
Name one thing, honestly
- What would it look like to name this stretch honestly to one manager or colleague, without treating it as a weakness? - Which optional project or commitment could you scale back this month? - Who at work could you actually confide in instead of managing this alone?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Tell one trusted colleague or mentor this month that the stretch has been genuinely hard.