The parts of ourselves we forget to update

What mushrooms, leadership and survival mode have in common

I am always pleased to see the first mushrooms coming up through the grass, but this year the turn of the season has come with a real sense of relief.

This summer has been difficult in ways I hadn’t quite expected. I struggled with the heat, worried about the animals and the lack of water, and did less of the things I love. So the mushrooms appearing, and water finally returning to the gill streams, is more than welcome.

The season is turning. And this year, I am very ready for it.

The lack of resources that stopped the forest from really flourishing this summer had a similar effect on me. I found myself slipping into survival mode: burning energy but not really blooming either.

Nature was doing much the same. Hanging on. Making do. Waiting for the conditions to change.

Which is perhaps why the mushrooms felt particularly significant.

They are not just a sign that autumn is arriving. Fungi do some of their most important work with what is already finished. They break down dead wood, fallen leaves and other organic matter, releasing nutrients back into the soil so they can support new growth.

And fungi are part of something bigger too. Many form symbiotic relationships with trees, exchanging nutrients and resources through networks beneath the soil. What looks, on the surface, like decay is also feeding and connecting the life around it.

Which, inevitably, got me thinking about life, work and everything in between - Because apparently I can’t look at a mushroom without finding a leadership metaphor - sorry not sorry.

That made me think about the parts of ourselves we never quite get round to auditing when one part of our life changes or ends. The roles, identities and ways of working that may no longer be useful and the parts that still are.

I can usually tell when my confidence is wobbling in a professional situation. I introduce myself as an ex-Chief Commercial Officer before I introduce myself as an executive coach.

I am proud that identity is part of my story. It is useful to the work I do now and has shaped a great deal of what I bring to it. But I also have to check myself. Some parts of that identity needed careful updating as I moved into a different life and a different kind of work. I know the difference between drawing on that experience because it is genuinely useful and reaching for it because I am worried that who I am now might not be quite enough.

If I’m really honest, there is a bit of me that worries about no longer being important. Becoming irrelevant. Not being needed. The rational part of my brain knows that my old title has very little to do with my relevance now. But old patterns still tell me that status, recognition and external validation are somehow proof that I am a worthwhile human being. I know that isn’t true. The slightly irritating part is that knowing something intellectually doesn’t automatically stop an old belief from having a say or driving behaviour that isn't helpful.

I have a lot of my identity wrapped up in work. I have for a long time, and building a completely different business has not magically untangled it.

The truth is that I genuinely love a lot of what came with that old identity. I love building businesses. I love seeing the bigger system, finding the commercial opportunity, making something work better and working out how to get more from what we already have. I like being entrepreneurial. I like being sharp. I like getting things done.

I don’t want to leave those things behind.

What I did need to examine was everything I had attached to that identity. The idea that status made me more relevant. That being needed made me more valuable. That external recognition was somehow evidence that I was doing life properly.

Those were the bits that were no longer serving me.

So the work isn’t to reject the old identity. It is to separate what is genuinely useful from the meaning I had wrapped around it.

But perhaps I don’t need to keep inhabiting that old identity in quite the same way for those parts of it to remain useful.

Like the fungi breaking down what is finished and returning it to the wider system, maybe the work is to let that old identity change form. To keep the parts that nourish what I am building now, while allowing the rest to become part of something broader.

Less living as the Chief Commercial Officer I once was. More taking what was valuable from her and letting it feed the person, coach, business owner and life I am building now.

Which leaves me with a more practical question.

So what am I taking with me, and what do I leave behind?

I want to keep the commercial instinct, the ambition, the ability to see the bigger system and the satisfaction I get from making things happen.

What I am questioning is whether all the survival behaviours that came with them still need to come too.

The running for the sake of running.

The need to prove usefulness.

The difficulty stopping when there is always, inevitably, something else I could be doing.

The slightly icky desire for status.

And, let’s be honest, the ego.

For me, that can look like trying to crack my website SEO for the millionth time when I could give myself permission to go for a walk.

Or wanting to say yes to a speaking invitation because it feels good to be asked, before stopping to consider whether it is something I actually want to do.

There is a difference between choosing to do something because it genuinely matters to me and choosing it because a slightly panicky part of me thinks that, if I stop being visible for five minutes, everyone will forget me or because I am still seeking approval from people whose opinions, if I’m honest, often don’t matter that much to me.

The value I helped create in my previous career has afforded me choices. I am fortunate in that. But it doesn’t mean the part of me that learned to operate from scarcity has entirely caught up.

Sometimes I still find myself working as though I have no choice, even when I do.

And that is when I have to consciously remind myself of my updated identity, my priorities, and the behaviours that actually support the life I am trying to build now.

What happens to the bits we no longer need?

Some of the behaviours I am trying to update are what I think of as survival behaviours.

Sometimes they began as coping mechanisms that helped us through periods of adversity. Sometimes they are simply habits we developed because, at some point, they helped us feel safe, useful, successful or in control.

These behaviours are often incredibly effective. They may be part of the reason we got where we did. The problem is that a behaviour can be useful in one season and costly in another. What helps you build a career can make it hard to step into what comes next or enjoy what you have built. And because these behaviours have often been rewarded, they can be surprisingly difficult to notice.

Nobody is likely to pull you aside and say:

“You seem to be achieving too much from a place of mild panic.”

Quite the opposite.

The world often rewards the output without asking too many questions about what is driving it.

That is why I am trying to get better at noticing the difference between something I genuinely want to do and something an older version of me thinks I need to do in order to stay useful, relevant or safe.

The aim is not to tell myself off for having those behaviours. Most of them were intelligent responses to the circumstances I was in. But I do want to keep asking whether they are still helping me now. Because when our circumstances change, our behaviours don’t automatically update with them. We can move into a new role, career or phase of life while still carrying the assumptions and habits that made sense in the old one.

We talk a lot about the transition from contributor to manager, and manager to leader.

We talk rather less about what happens after we have led something, built something, perhaps been very successful at it and then find ourselves wondering what comes next. An advisory role. A NED position. A portfolio career.

Or simply a different way of leading the life and work we already have.

The external change can actually be the relatively easy bit. We can change the job without changing the identity, assumptions and behaviours we carry with us.

And I wonder if this is where the metaphor becomes useful again.

I am not suggesting that you or I are a dead tree. That would be a fairly bleak coaching proposition.

But nature is constantly adapting what is already there. Trees shed leaves, are coppiced, grow around damage and take on new shapes. And when something really has reached the end of its life, it doesn’t simply become useless.

Fungi help break it down. Nutrients return to the soil. Other things feed from it. What has finished in one form becomes useful in another.

Maybe our old identities can work like that too.

Some parts simply need adapting or growing in a different direction. Others may genuinely have done their job.

Either way, nothing has to be carried forward in exactly the form it had before.

I don’t need to remain a Chief Commercial Officer forever, nor do I need to ceremonially chuck that part of myself into the forest.

I can take it apart. Keep what is useful and leave behind what isn’t.

Audit the identity and choose the behaviour rather than simply repeating it.

And this doesn’t only apply when something has ended. Sometimes we are still very much in the same role, career or life, but the way we lead within it needs to grow in a different direction.

Some things need leaving behind.

Others just need pruning, adapting or using differently.

That feels very different from telling myself I was wrong, or bad, or that I have to start again.

Most of those behaviours existed for a reason.

Many of them helped me get here.

So I increasingly prefer:

Thank you for your service.

You helped me when I needed you.

That isn’t normally one grand goodbye.

Sometimes it is catching myself doing something familiar, writing it down, talking it through, or asking:

Hang on. Why am I actually doing this?

Getting it outside my head helps me see whether I am making a choice or simply following an old instruction.

Making room to choose

Like so much of my coaching, this work is shaped by the work I continue to do on myself and by what the forest keeps teaching me.

I don’t think I can ask other people to examine their assumptions, patterns and ways of working without being willing to keep doing the same myself.

So, perhaps unsurprisingly, this is a significant part of the work I do with my coaching clients.

It comes up, in one form or another, in most people’s coaching. And it is something we explore deliberately during a visioning retreat, where there is more space to step back and look at what they want to carry forward, what needs updating and what they are ready to stop doing on autopilot.

Not deciding that everything old needs to go. Not inventing an entirely new self. But creating enough space to consider what you want to take with you, what needs updating, and what might be more useful if you stopped trying to carry it forward in exactly the same form.

Away from the immediate list of things that need doing, there is room to ask what all that doing is actually for.

To notice the difference between a goal that still genuinely matters and an expectation you have simply never stopped to question.

A few days away won’t neatly resolve an identity or undo years of habit. But they can give you enough distance to see the pattern.

And then comes the slightly inconvenient bit: going back into everyday life and discovering that knowing why you do something does not, annoyingly, mean you automatically stop doing it.

That is where ongoing coaching matters.

Not endlessly analysing the old behaviour, but noticing it when it appears and practising a different choice.

Perhaps that is why the turn of the season feels like such a fitting time for this work. Nature doesn’t seem particularly interested in preserving everything exactly as it was. So what can we learn from that?

So perhaps the question isn’t simply:

What do I need to let go of?

Perhaps it is:

What has served me well, but doesn’t need to come with me in its current form?

What do I want to protect and carry forward?

What needs pruning, adapting or redirecting?

And what might become useful in an entirely different way if I stopped trying to keep it intact?

Those are the questions I am sitting with.

If you are at a similar point, this is exactly the kind of space I create through my one-to-one retreats here in Ashdown Forest, as well as through online and walk-and-talk coaching.

We start with a conversation about where you are, what you need, and whether this is the right way to approach it.

You can get in touch at emma@thorpcoaching.com.

Emma

P.S. If you enjoy these reflections and would like to explore some of the themes with others, I’m piloting Notes from the Forest gatherings: an online space for stories, reflection and conversation. The pilot is currently full, but I plan to open it more widely. Drop me a line if you would like to join the waiting list.