The Quiet Season That Isn't Coming

You know the sentence. You have been saying some version of it for longer than you would like to admit.

After the gala. After the board meeting. After the grant comes through.

Then things will settle. Then you will address this. Then you will have the time and the space and the energy to actually think about what needs to change.

The quieter season has been six months away for three years.

This is not a planning problem. You are an exceptional planner — your organization runs on your ability to think ahead, sequence priorities, manage competing demands. If this were a scheduling problem, you would have solved it by now.

The waiting is doing something else.

It is protecting you from having to find out what happens if you stop. If you slow down, something might wobble. If you step back, someone might need something you are not there to provide. If you actually take the space you keep promising yourself, you might have to sit with how depleted you actually are — and that feels, right now, like a luxury you cannot afford.

So the quieter season stays six months away. Close enough to feel like a plan. Far enough never to arrive.

I know this because I lived it. I was a nonprofit Executive Director telling myself the same story. After this grant. After this board transition. After we get through this particularly hard season.

What I eventually understood is that the waiting was not laziness or poor planning. It was a very reasonable response to a role that had quietly organized itself around my being always available, always steady, always on.

Stopping felt dangerous because, in a real sense, it was. The system needed me to keep going. So I kept going.

Until I couldn't.

Here is the one thing I want you to take from this issue.

Not a challenge to stop waiting — that is too large and too vague to be useful.

Just this: notice how long you have been saying "after this."

Write it down if it helps. How many "afters" have passed. How many times the quieter season was almost here. Not to judge it. Just to see it clearly, outside of your head, on paper.

Sometimes the simple act of seeing how long the story has been running is enough to loosen its grip — just slightly. And slightly is where everything starts.

I work with women nonprofit Executive Directors on exactly this — the gap between knowing something needs to change and being able to do it differently. If this letter is landing, I would be glad to talk. You can book a free 30-minute conversation here.