THE WORLD HAS KNOCKED US SIDEWAYS - FALLEN TREE

The world has knocked a lot of us sideways. The question is what we do next.

I saw a fallen tree on my walk this morning. Not snapped — just knocked horizontal by something. Wind, age, weight. But it was still alive. Still putting out leaves. Growing, just from a completely different angle than the one it had always known.

I can’t stop thinking about it.

When I stepped away from senior executive life — from the titles, the institutions, the organisations whose names made people's eyes light up in a certain way — I thought the hard part would be figuring out what came next. It wasn't. The harder thing, the thing that crept up on me slowly, was realising that my sense of my own value had been quietly tied to that scaffolding for years. The White House. Equinor. Harvard. I hadn't known how much weight they were carrying for me until they were gone.

What I also hadn't noticed — until I was horizontal — were the roots I already had. The coaching. The moderating. The ability to hold a room through a hard conversation. They had always been there, growing quietly alongside the main trunk. But they weren't my "main thing," so I'd never given them their due weight.

The tree didn't grow new roots. It found new ground for the ones it already had.

A lot of people I talk to right now are feeling knocked sideways. Jobs shifting. Industries reshaping. Identities that once felt solid suddenly uncertain. And the instinct — understandable, human — is to panic about what's been lost.

But I keep coming back to that tree.

What if the question isn't what do I do next, but what do I already have that I haven't fully valued? What roots are alive in you right now that you've been underestimating because they weren't your main thing?

The ground has changed. But you might have more to work with than you think.

I wrote about a related dimension of this a while back - read more here

Best wishes,

Xenia

Wickett Advisory 

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