#22 Seasons of Change
As we enter the beautiful season of change, let's reflect on the seasons of change in our lives.
Steve Steele
9/28/20268 min read
The Season That Teaches You to Let Go
Every year in South Dakota there's some semblance of a moment when you walk outside and it seems like something has shifted overnight.
It's usually not dramatic. The sun is still there and the sky might be even bluer than it was a week ago. But there's a coolness at the edges, a smell that didn't exist in August or September that tells you, the season has changed.
I love that moment. I have loved it my whole life. Somewhat because it is football season. Somewhat because it means it's time for hoodie and shorts weather (the best weather), and partly because the change in the weather, always seems to provide an opportunity for change in yourself.
Fall is the most honest season. It doesn't pretend things stay the same, leaves always change as does the weather. It doesn't ease you into the change or ask your permission. It simply begins becoming what it was always going to become, right in front of you, whether you're ready or not. And in that honesty, I think it has more to teach us about leadership, about faith, and about living a full life, than any other time on the calendar.
What the Leaves Are Actually Doing
Here is the thing about fall foliage that most people know intellectually but rarely sit with long enough to feel: the colors we find so beautiful is a tree in the process of letting go. Bear with me for a brief science discussion.
The reds, the oranges, the golds aren't the leaves at their peak of health. They are the leaves at the end of their season, releasing the chlorophyll that kept them green and productive all summer, revealing the pigments that were underneath the whole time. The tree is pulling nutrients back into itself, preparing for a long winter, doing the quiet interior work that will make the beauty of spring possible.
The most beautiful version of the leaf is the one that has accepted what is coming.
I have thought about that a lot in seasons of my own life when I was holding on too tightly to something that needed to be released. A plan that wasn't working. An expectation that wasn't being met. A version of the future I had decided was the right one, that God kept gently redirecting toward something I couldn't see yet. The instinct in those moments is always to grip harder, to fight the change, to insist that green is the only color worth being.
But the tree doesn't fight it. The tree just trusts the process it was designed for. And in letting go, it produces something that stops people in their tracks.
The Season That Almost Broke Us
The 2024 football season began with our program sitting on seven consecutive state championships, the most consecutive championships in South Dakota history. By mid-October, we had lost four games in a row.
I won't pretend I handled the transition gracefully. I mowed my lawn one Saturday morning to clear my head and launched a tire over my shoulder in frustration when it wouldn't cooperate. I then watched it roll across my neighbor's yard and down their hill. I sat in an adoration chapel trying to find my footing, wrestling with the reality of where we were as a team, and what it meant for us, and even myself.
I was holding on to a version of the season, of the program, of myself as a coach that the season had already moved past. I was still summer, but the calendar had already turned.
The shift didn't happen on a practice field. It happened when I stopped trying to explain the losing streak and started accepting it. When I stopped looking for reasons the losses were justified and started asking what this particular fall was trying to build in us. When I let go of what the season was supposed to be and started paying attention to what it actually was.
What it was, as it turned out, was preparation. The adversity of that stretch produced a resilience and a cohesion in our team that wouldn't have been forged any other way. By the time the playoffs arrived, we were a completely different team than the one that had gone 2-4. We had become who we needed to be, but only because the hard middle of the season had stripped away the things that weren't serving us anymore and forced us to find new answers to different problems.
The losing streak was the leaves changing color. The green was gone. What was underneath turned out to be more beautiful and would turn into one of my favorite games we would play in a massive semifinal upset where we swung the previous result over 30 points.
What Fall Costs
I want to be honest about something because I think leadership writing too often treats change as clean and inspiring when the reality is significantly messier and difficult.
Fall costs something. The tree doesn't just get to enjoy the colors, it loses the leaves. By November, the branches are bare. The same process that produces the most stunning display of the year ends with the most exposed version of the tree, standing against a gray sky with nothing left to hide behind.
Change is like that too. The letting go that produces something beautiful also produces a period of bareness. A chapter closes, and for a stretch of time before the next one opens, you're standing in the in-between. You are stripped of what was, not yet sure of what's coming. That space is real and it is uncomfortable, and anyone who tells you it isn't probably hasn't been through a real transition.
When I moved from the classroom into the CEO role at the Boys & Girls Club, there was genuine exhilaration in the change. There was also a real loss of an identity I had carried for years, of a certainty about my own competence that came from a decade of mastering a set of skills, of the simplicity of knowing exactly what I was doing every day. I traded a frame I understood for one I would have to learn to live inside. The colors were striking. The bareness was also real.
I've watched players go through the same thing. As their Senior season ends and they move past the last game, the last bus ride, the last time in the locker room with the boys, what follows isn't immediately a new chapter. It's a long moment of standing in the cold with bare branches, figuring out who you are without the thing that defined you for years.
The reality for our kids is the Senior year in many ways is the first major "fall" of their lives. They get to show their big, beautiful colors all year, but as they approach graduation, their leaves are all gone and they arrive at the big moment of, "What do I do now?" and most importantly, "Who am I?" The end of football season is in some ways, the first batch of leaves that fall off the tree. For the majority of our kids, it is the end of their football career and after that day they will no longer be a football player ever again. No matter how their final snap ends, the emotions of this process are beautiful to witness, and important for us to acknowledge.
What This Fall Is Asking
Every fall asks a question. The question is different depending on what season of life you're in, but it is always some version of the same thing:
What are you being asked to release?
For some of us, the answer is obvious. A chapter is visibly ending with a career transition, a child leaving home, a relationship that has run its course, a role that no longer fits the person you've become. The leaves are already turning. You know the letting go is coming whether you choose it or not.
For others, the answer is subtler. The thing you're holding onto isn't gone yet, it's just not growing anymore. It's still green on the surface, still functional, still familiar. But something in you knows that the season has shifted, that you're in the early stages of a change you haven't fully admitted to yourself yet.
And for some of us, fall is asking something different entirely: not what to release, but what the bareness might finally make visible. What has been hiding underneath the green, waiting for the leaves to clear, that might now be seen for the first time?
Some of the clearest self-knowledge I have ever gained came in the stripped-down seasons. The ones where the comfortable identities fell away and I was left standing with what was actually underneath. A kid from Michigan who wasn't the cool one, who found out he was a leader when sports gave him the field to prove it. A young coach who found out he could call plays when no one else was going to do it for him. A head coach who found out he was enough in a year he spent trying to convince someone else he was.
The bare tree knows what it's made of in a way the full tree never does.
The Colors Are Already Here
One of the things I love most about this time of year in South Dakota is that the change doesn't announce itself and then make you wait. It just starts happening. You look up one morning on the way to work and the trees that were entirely green last week are now threaded through with gold and orange, and it happened while you were going about your life, not watching for it.
That's how most of the important changes work, I think. You don't get a memo. You just look up one day and realize the season has already begun.
So look up. Take stock of where you are and what the season around you is doing. Notice what is shifting in the air, in your work, in your relationships, in the quiet places of your interior life where God tends to do His most important preparation work.
If you're in the letting go, trust the process. The beauty is in it, even when it doesn't feel that way.
If you're in the bareness, stay rooted. The roots are doing something in the winter that the branches will get the credit for in spring.
And if you're in the color, if this is one of those stretches where everything is vivid and the light is hitting perfectly and you can feel alive, be present in it. Don't rush past it on the way to the next thing. Some falls are breathtaking, and they deserve to be received that way.
Every season ends. That's not a tragedy.
It's a promise that something new is coming.
PARTING THOUGHTS
Think about the last significant change in your life that you resisted before eventually accepting. What did the letting go produce that the holding on never could have? What was the color hiding underneath the green?
The tree doesn't fight the season, it trusts the process it was designed for. Is there something in your life right now that you're fighting to keep green, when the season may already be calling it to change? What would it look like to stop gripping and start trusting?
Fall strips the tree bare before it can rest and prepare for spring. What season of bareness in your own story turned out to be doing deeper work than you realized at the time?
If this fall is asking you to release something, what is it? And if it's asking you to finally see something that's been hidden underneath, what do you think that might be?