Something happens at the start of September that no diary entry quite captures. The day starts a little earlier and the air feels different before the first coffee. The garden that looked completely defeated two weeks ago has started coming alive. Somewhere in the body, without any conscious decision, something changes.
Our brains and bodies are genuinely responsive to light, and after months of shortened winter days and evenings that closed in before 6pm, spring gives the system more to work with.
Increased exposure to natural light, particularly in the morning, helps regulate the circadian rhythm. The internal clock that influences when we feel alert, when we feel tired, and how we experience our own mood and energy from one day to the next.
The lift that most people feel around this time of year has a real physiological basis, and it tends to arrive before we've consciously registered what's causing it.
I think of it as the body catching up to what the calendar already knows.
Working harder isn’t the solution
In my work as an executive coach, one of the things I've noticed over many years is how often capable people try to solve an energy or capacity problem by simply working harder.
It usually consists of longer hours, earlier starts, and more items added to an already full list. There are moments when that's necessary; however, sustained over time, it doesn't solve an energy problem but it does deepen one.
What nature demonstrates each September is that growth isn't primarily about effort. Plants don't push their way into bloom through willpower; they grow because the conditions around them begin to support growth. The combination of light, warmth and moisture creates the environment in which something that was dormant becomes possible again.
People respond to their conditions in ways that aren't entirely different, and the cultures we build around our teams either create those conditions or undermine them, often without anyone fully realising it's happening.
Jackie Kennedy 12 Jun 2026 Spring, of course, arrives with a complication.
In the southern hemisphere, the 1st of September also signals that the final stretch of the working year is beginning.
Alongside the jacarandas and the longer mornings comes the Q4 reality check including projects to close, budgets to deliver, targets to meet, year-end functions to plan, school calendars to navigate and the growing awareness that the things we were certain we'd have done by now are still sitting in exactly the same place we left them in March.
The renewed energy of spring and the pressure of the final quarter tend to arrive together, and how leaders respond to that combination matters more than most productivity systems acknowledge.
When cognitive load remains high over a sustained period, the prefrontal cortex - the part of the brain we rely on for planning, prioritising and sound decision-making - has to work considerably harder to produce the same quality of output.
Carrying too many competing priorities simultaneously doesn't increase what gets done; it degrades the thinking applied to everything on the list. The temptation to accelerate into Q4 with everything at once is understandable, and it tends to be expensive by November.
What I've found more useful, both in my own work and with the leaders I coach, is to treat September as an honest reset rather than a recovery sprint.
This reset begins with three questions that sound straightforward and require more honesty than most people expect.
Frik van der Westhuizen 15 May 2026 Here’s three questions to ask yourself:
1. What actually matters before December?
I am not talking about the full list, but the two or three things that would genuinely move something meaningful forward if they were delivered well.
Leadership involves as much clarity about what to set aside as about what to pursue, and September is a good moment to make that distinction deliberately rather than letting urgency make it by default.
2. What can be released without real consequence?
Some priorities were entirely reasonable in January and have since been overtaken by changing circumstances, shifting directions, or clearer realities as the year developed.
Holding onto a goal beyond the point where it makes sense is weight that consumes energy that could go somewhere more useful.
Giving yourself permission to reassess and let go of what no longer fits is one of the more honest things a leader can do at this point in the year.
3. Where is it genuinely best directed?
A significant amount of mental and emotional energy gets spent on things that return very little.
For example, a difficult dynamic that isn't ours to resolve, perfectionism applied to work that only needs to be good enough, meetings that don't require our presence, problems that have already been decided.
What I remind leaders is that energy isn't unlimited, and the leaders who tend to arrive at the end of the year with their judgment and their relationships intact are almost always the ones who became deliberate about where they spent it.
Behavioural researchers have written about what they call the fresh-start effect - the way temporal landmarks like a new year, a birthday or a change of season can create a genuine psychological dividing line between what came before and what becomes possible from here.
These moments give people permission to draw a line and begin again, and they carry more practical weight than most planning frameworks account for.
The start of September can be one of those moments, if we choose to use it that way.
The final stretch of the year doesn't have to be a race to recover what didn't happen in the first eight months. It can be a considered, deliberate push towards what matters most - one that leaves room for the kind of thinking, recovery and presence that sustains performance rather than depleting it.
Get outside for 10 minutes. Your circadian rhythm will appreciate it, and so will the version of you who arrives at December with something still in reserve.
