It’s Bank Holiday weekend, which for a lot of us means the last proper pause before fixed rhythms come back – schools, terms, the version of the year that runs on a timetable again whether we’re ready for it or not.
I think about the sea a fair bit. It’s part of how I make sense of things, long before it was ever useful for a newsletter. The tide going out doesn’t mean the water’s gone. It means it’s somewhere else for a while, pulled by something bigger than the stretch of sand in front of you, and it’s coming back on its own schedule regardless of whether you’re stood there watching the empty shoreline, convincing yourself it’s permanent.
Business runs the same way more often than we admit. The flat month. The enquiry that goes cold and never comes back. The launch that should have landed and just didn’t, for reasons you can spend weeks trying to diagnose and never fully pin down. It feels, in the moment, like the water’s gone for good, like whatever made things work before has simply stopped working, and you’re the only person standing on an empty beach wondering if the sea’s coming back for you specifically. It’s out. It’s turning. It comes back whether or not you spend the whole low tide panicking about it.
What counts is what you do while it’s out. Some people spend low tide convinced it’s permanent, and they dismantle things that were actually working, out of panic rather than evidence. Others use the lull to mend the nets – the admin, the systems, the follow-up sequence nobody’s looked at since March, the bits of the business that never get attention when things are busy.
Something to sit with this week:
What have you been treating as a permanent low tide that’s actually just… low tide? And what could you be mending while you wait for it to turn?
It always turns. It’s just not always on your timetable.
#UnleashYourAwesome