🌿 Welcome to the middle

Hello Reader!

By the end of September, the one focus you chose at the start of the year has probably settled into something quieter than it was a few weeks ago, less exciting than those first days when everything about it felt fresh, clear, and full of possibility.

Perhaps the reminder you set for yourself no longer catches your eye the way it once did, or the practice you committed to now feels more like routine than discovery. We want to name that shift honestly, because this is exactly the point where most of us quietly let go of what we started. Not because it stopped mattering, but because the novelty wore off and nothing new arrived to replace it.

Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter put it simply when she observed that everything can look like a failure in the middle. Oof. Beginnings carry energy and endings carry relief, and yet the middle, the long, unremarkable stretch where a real skill actually gets built, is rarely celebrated and almost never feels like progress while you are standing in it.

That is where you are now, and it is where we are going to stay together through October. This month's theme is deepening. This is about the slow, invisible middle of building a real skill, the part that asks for patience, repetition, and trust rather than another burst of new ideas.

From here, the invitation this week is to keep your one focus, resist the pull to trade it in for something shinier, and simply notice what it feels like to practice something once it is no longer new.

A few questions to sit with:
1. How has your relationship with your one focus changed from a few weeks ago?
2. What tends to happen for you when the newness of something wears off?
3. What would it look like to treat this quieter stretch as the real beginning rather than a sign that things are fading?

It is possible to build something lasting here, and the middle is exactly where that work happens, one ordinary week at a time.

We would love to hear how your one focus is feeling as September comes to a close.

Warmly,

Tammy

P.S. Don't miss out on tomorrow's email... another awesome episode of the podcast is out! Chatting the Rekenrek with Amy How!

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