🌗 Bears don't feel FOMO about salmon

⏱️ Reading time: 5 minutes

Welcome to Fearless — my weekly-ish newsletter where I share leadership insights and honest advice for women of color in social impact navigating power, career, and change.

It's that time of year. Conference season. Board season. Budget season. Everyone is back from leave, and everyone is moving at once.

If you're anything like me, you've scrolled LinkedIn this week, watched someone post from UNGA or Climate Week or announce their biggest quarter yet, and felt the tug: Should I be at those conferences? Should I be doing more right now?

Try a different question. Not "am I doing enough?" but "what season am I in?"

The world runs on seasons

Farmers know this in their bones. A fallow field isn't lazy. It's rebuilding. Land asked to produce every single day eventually produces nothing.

Animals know it too. Bears den. Birds migrate. Ground squirrels and bats hibernate for months, and wood frogs literally freeze solid through winter and thaw in spring! Seriously, no one accuses the bear of falling behind the salmon...

We can't even agree on how many seasons there are. In Puerto Rico, where I live, it's mostly a wet season and a dry one, plus hurricane season from June through November. In Bangladesh, the calendar counts six, each about two months long, including a monsoon season of its own. Thailand is commonly counted as three: hot, rainy, and cool. The rainy season is also when Buddhist monks traditionally go on a three-month retreat. And in South Africa, the seasons run opposite to the northern hemisphere.

Right now it's early fall/autumn in New York and early spring in Cape Town. Same month, different season, and nobody is wrong. Your season doesn't have to look like anyone else's.

Yin, yang, and the space between

A client recently reminded me of yin and yang, and how people who didn't grow up Taoist learned it as good versus bad, light versus dark. The older image is simpler: the sunny side and the shady side of a mountain, trading places as the sun moves. Nothing is permanently light or dark. It's a question of when.

That idea sits at the heart of Taoism, a philosophy more than two thousand years old about moving with the rhythms of nature instead of against them. Its foundational text, the Dao De Jing (also spelled Tao Te Ching), is a slim book of 81 short chapters, much of it about how leaders lead. I first studied it about twenty years ago, and it has stayed one of my favorite books. In chapter 42, it says that all things carry yin on their backs and embrace yang. Not one or the other. Both, in motion.

Yang is the sunny side of the mountain: movement, action, effort, momentum. Yin is the shady side: stillness, receptivity, rest. Neither is better. But we live in a society that worships yang, with its constant motion, constant output, and hustle culture, often to our own detriment.

As a side note, that's why yin yoga feels so refreshing to me. You hold a pose for minutes with no urgency and are reminded that the stillness is part of the practice.

Here's what I keep noticing, in myself and in the leaders I coach: we're bad at both halves. In the hard seasons, everything is an emergency, so there's no time to rest. And then even in the calmer seasons, we think we have so much space, we can do so much, let's do it all, so there's no time to rest then either. One client described an entire conference where they and a colleague were both running so fast they never once sat down together.

And when you're preparing for the next season while everyone around you celebrates this one, it can feel like you're out of step. That's a lot of what FOMO is. Not a real gap, just a mismatch between your season and the loudest one.

Notice, too, that the yin-yang symbol thins out where light and dark meet. Those in-between stretches are seasons of their own. Maybe that's where rest lives.

My own seasons

I'm in a few at once. Midlife. A season of tending to my body in the middle of a fertility journey. And a season of building the latest and greatest iteration of Fearless, my "work baby," which I've been in since we launched in February.

I expect to stay in build mode for at least six more months. Besides the core work of coaching and community-building, right now that looks like strengthening our foundations in operations and finance, engaging in research behind the scenes, and onboarding and welcoming Sara Bonyadi, our first-ever part-time Community Manager after years as a volunteer.

Chapter 17 of the Dao De Jing describes the best leaders as the ones whose people say, when the work is done, "we did it ourselves." That's what I hope for as our community grows and our roles grow with it.

At the same time, we're getting ready to share our impact and reach out to donors. So yes, the seasons overlap. Outreach is beginning while the build isn't finished.

But the overlap is real and one season is still dominant. Mine is build. Being honest about that helps me say no to things that belong to a different season (like going to conferences), and stop feeling guilty about it.

I'm also leaning into my JOMO phase: the joy of missing out. It's what FOMO can turn into once you know which season you're in.

What I want for you

If you're at UNGA or Climate Week, or juggling a heavy travel calendar, you may be in a season of reaching out and expanding. Honor it. Show up fully. The right room can open a door. Just don't forget to follow up! That's a key part of the process.

If you're at home with your head down delivering the thing, you may be in a build season. Honor that too. The leaders who seem to arrive overnight usually spent years doing work you never saw. A network can open the door, but you still need something to walk through it with. You might even find some JOMO along the way!

Either way, you're not falling behind. The anxiety usually comes from living in one season while measuring yourself by someone else's calendar.

Three questions to try today

1. Which season is dominant for me right now: build, dream and expand, or in-between?
2. What is that season asking of me between now and December 31, including rest?
3. What am I doing only because someone else's season is loud?

You don't have to fix anything. Answer honestly, and notice what loosens.

Want to do this together?

On September 30, I'm hosting a free 90-minute workshop on Zoom for exactly this stretch between now and the holidays. We'll do a nervous system check-in, a Wholeness Check across work, home, self, and community, and a Build/Dream Venn to find where you land. You'll leave with one sentence about where you want to be by December 31 and a 30-day grounding plan.

If you attend live, you'll get a super early-bird code for 20% off Flourish Fellowship Cohort 4 (starting November 1). It's only valid through October 1, and spots are limited, but I would love to see you there!

With you, in whatever season you're in,

Maya 🧡

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💛 Hecho con amor en el archipiélago de Puerto Rico 🇵🇷 | 1607 Avenida Ponce de Léon, GM6 PMB165, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00909