Fall Reset: When Fall Doesn’t Look the Way You Thought

If you had asked me back in June what my September would look like, I would have given you a confident answer. New routines. A clear head. Real progress on the goals I set for myself back in January. I wouldn’t need a fall reset; I’d be ahead of the game. Instead, here I am, a couple of weeks after Labor Day, and my fall isn’t looking at all the way I thought.

I want to tell you the truth about this fall instead of pretending it’s going the way I planned. I suspect I’m not the only one feeling this way.

The summer that got away from me

This year threw me a curve ball. A health issue pulled me out of my normal routine for weeks. It wasn’t a life-or-death event, but it was sufficiently scary to require a complete step back. I suddenly had appointments where there used to be work sessions. Naps where there used to be plans. Days that technically happened but that I can barely account for now.

By the time I had the energy to look up again, most of summer was gone. The projects I meant to finish were still unfinished. The habits I meant to build never got built. The book I meant to read is still on my nightstand with the same bookmark in the same spot. And the summer goals I wrote down so confidently back in January, the ones that felt so achievable at the time, now feel like they belong to a different person. A person with more energy than I currently have. A person whose year went according to plan.

Maybe you’ve had a season like that too. One where life happened faster than your plans could keep up with. Maybe it was your health, a family member’s, a job that fell apart, a move, or a loss. Maybe it was just one of those stretches where everything seemed to land at once. Know this: you’re not alone in wishing for a fall reset.

What to do when your fall isn’t looking the way you thought

I started out doing what I always do when I feel behind. I made a huge to-do list. I opened a fresh document and started writing down everything I was behind on. Seeing it all in one place makes me think it’ll all seem more manageable instead of less. It didn’t. If anything, it made everything feel worse.

So I caught myself. It’s taken a lot of years, but I recognize this pattern in myself now. It’s the same thing I hear from so many of you when you write in. We think the antidote to feeling behind is doing more, faster, with a longer list. But a longer list was never the problem. The problem was that I was trying to plan my way out of a feeling. My fall wasn’t looking the way I thought it would.

We’ve all been here. Someone we love dies and we think the grief process should be resolvable. (Hint: it’s not.) Our career trajectory gets ripped from us. (Hint: if it hasn’t happened yet, it still may.) Something happens in our body that puts our health center stage. (Hint: this will almost certainly happen at some point).

As with so much in life, when any of these things happen to us we have choices. The older I get, the more these choices become a simple dichotomy: give in to it, or find a way to move forward.

When fall doesn’t look like you thought, change the plan

I’m a big planner, a goal-setter. This is neither good nor bad, it just is for me. But when life throws something large in my path, I have learned I will probably need to pivot, not try to plow through it. What this means, practically, is that I first need to let myself sit with the feeling that’s arisen (grief, anger, fear). Then begin thinking about how to amend the plan to fit my new reality.

This is not easy. It is not easy to sit with pain, physical or emotional. Anger or frustration can be strangely circular; I call it “spinning” and it’s when we find our thoughts caught in a loop of negativity. Moving through these losses is a process and it often does begin with negative feelings. The key is to recognize the spin and find a way to move your thoughts to higher ground.

The fall reset panic that shows up in September

Here’s what nobody tells you about falling behind: the panic doesn’t show up in the moment you fall behind. In the moment, you’re too busy surviving whatever is actually happening to notice you’re off track. The panic shows up later. In this season, it’s the school-supply displays and the pumpkin-everything that remind you we’re in a new season while we still feel stuck in the last one.

No matter where we are come fall, fall marches on. But there is a way to take a pause, reassess, and go forward, confident in your intentions, focused on what’s truly important to you. Sometimes a fall reset is just what we need.

What I’m doing about it

For me, this is all strangely ironic. Last spring and summer I began building the 4-step Fall Reset I’ll show you in a minute. Trust me, I had no idea what was coming for me, mid-summer. But I built this free download for exactly this moment. My required pause has given me the chance to fine tune it. Even as I stare down a season that isn’t going the way I’d hoped.

It’s called Your Fall Reset, and it walks you through the four steps I’ve laid out, in about twenty minutes. There’s no expensive planner required, no all-day retreat, no pressure to have it all figured out by the time you close the document.

I’m using it myself this week. Not as a metaphor. I’m literally sitting down with my coffee and working through it, because I need this as much as I ever have. It’s one of those strange, useful things about building tools for other people. Eventually they end up being exactly what I need too.

If there’s some part of your fall looks nothing like you thought it would, I’d love for you to work through it with me.

Why a reset is different from a restart

A restart says: pretend none of this happened and try again from the top. It’s the January-first energy of an all-new plan, an all-new you, no acknowledgment of the months in between. It sounds motivating, but it’s actually a little cruel, because it asks you to act as though the tough season simply didn’t occur.

A reset is different. A reset says: look at what actually happened; decide what to carry forward and what to let go of; and choose a smaller number of things to focus on. It doesn’t erase the season you had. It supports it. It assumes you’re not starting from zero; you’re starting from exactly where you are now.

That distinction matters more than you might think. A restart keeps me stuck in a loop of starting over every few months, never building on anything, always beginning again from scratch. A reset lets me actually move forward, because it takes the real conditions of my life into account instead of pretending they don’t exist.

This is the whole idea behind the framework I use every time I feel like this, whether it’s September or any other month that got away from me. I call the stages: Gather. Release. Tend. Plant. Four simple steps.

If your fall doesn’t look like you planned

Here’s what I keep coming back to. A season that didn’t go according to plan isn’t a failed season. It’s one of the gifts of having more than a few years under your belt. I’ve survived harder things. I’ll survive and get through this, too.

The goals we set in January were made by a version of us who didn’t know what this year would ask. So we get a do-over.

So if you’re behind on what you meant to do this fall, if summer slipped past you faster than you’d anticipated, or if you feel that low hum of panic every time you think about everything ahead, come sit with me for twenty minutes. We’ll gather what’s true, release what isn’t helping, tend to what matters, and plant something small enough to actually grow. It’s Your Fall Reset.