If I am being honest with you, I have been sitting with this topic for a while. And the longer I sit with it the more I realize the thing I most need to let go of before this year ends is my expectations. The grip they have on my reality. The way I hold them over myself, over the people around me, over the version of this year I had planned in my head back in January.
Expectations are quiet. They do not announce themselves. They just sit there, underneath everything, deciding in advance what success looks like and what failure looks like and exactly who is to blame when things do not go to plan. And when real life intervenes, when the roadblocks show up and the setbacks hit, there I am handing the keys to blame, frustration, and self-abandonment all at once.
I have started calling it what it is. I am a master of self-sabotage. No one else can disappoint me or tell me otherwise if I have already done it myself. It hurts less that way.
Sound familiar?
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Shakespeare
What nobody ever talks about is the insanity it brings to the people around you who can see your pattern before you can. Who are watching you repeat the same cycle and holding their breath waiting for the moment the awareness arrives.
Sometimes it does. And sometimes the pattern gets named and the response is "that is just who I am" or "that is just how life works." And that is perhaps the most frustrating thing I have ever witnessed, because we were not put here to live a life of misery just to avoid the discomfort of growth.
And here is the thing about that: the pattern is not actually the problem. The refusal to look at it is.
So why is letting go so hard?
Comfort.
Comfort keeps us complacent, compliant, and small. But here is what nobody says out loud: comfort also keeps us feeling safe. And that is a very different thing than being stuck or being lazy. When your nervous system has been in survival mode, when life has taught you that change usually means loss, holding onto the familiar is not weakness. It is protection.
The question is just whether that protection is still serving you, or whether it has become the thing keeping you in place.
Because the only thing you actually have to lose when you let go is the people, the patterns, and the version of life that did not deserve you in the first place.
That is why pruning is not punishment. It is permission.
You cannot hold onto the things that drag you down, hold you back, or keep you exactly where you are and simultaneously expect your life to change. That is not how growth works. Pruning is simply this: you are retraining yourself to stop accepting less than you deserve. You are creating space. You are deciding, on purpose, what actually gets to come with you into the next season. Punishment looks back and assigns blame. Permission looks forward and creates room.
I am going to admit something that is even hard for me to say out loud. I did not do the pruning work this year. And the repercussions of that have shown up everywhere. Burnout. Overstimulation. Overwhelm. Decision fatigue. Exhaustion. Physical injuries piling up on top of each other. Mental health that has been, to put it gently, not great.
Because I have always held high expectations. For myself, for the people around me. And when reality intervenes, when the bar I set is too high to even attempt in the first place, I do not adjust the bar. I blame myself for not clearing it. I put self-abandonment in the driver's seat and call it standards.
That is the part I am pruning this year. Not the dreams. Not the ambition. The expectations that were never rooted in reality to begin with. Next year the goals get built from where I actually am, not from where I think I should already be.
So here is what I want to give you before we get into the prompts. A permission slip.
You have permission to prune your high expectations of yourself and of others.
You have permission to release the idea that the laundry has to be done or the dishes cannot sit in the sink or the house has to look a certain way at all times.
You have permission to stop waiting on the village that is not showing up.
You have permission to let go of the belief that people will listen the first time, that you should be at 100% all the time, that self-doubt means something is wrong with you.
You have permission to stop believing that overplanning and overthinking will ever actually make you feel safe.
And if you are running a business without childcare, you have full permission to release the idea that this is supposed to be easy or that needing more than you have right now is a personal failure.
None of those things were making you better. They were just making you exhausted.
4 Journal Prompts for the Autumn Pruning Season
These are not about having the answers. They are about being honest enough to start looking.
Prompt 1 What is one thing you are still carrying right now that, if you are truly honest with yourself, has already stopped serving you? Do not explain why you are keeping it. Just name what it is.
Prompt 2 What does holding onto this thing give you that feels like safety? Be specific. What are you actually protecting yourself from by not letting go?
Prompt 3 Where have your expectations of yourself or others been set at a bar you were never actually going to reach? What would a realistic, grace-filled version of that expectation look like instead?
Prompt 4 Look at everything you are trying to maintain right now. Cross out anything that is optional. What is left that is actually essential? What were you holding onto out of habit, fear, or worry about what someone else would think?
Pruning is not a one-time event. It is a seasonal practice. And autumn is the perfect time to start because the trees are already showing you how it is done.
If you want a dedicated space to do this work, our Mental Unload Digital Journals were built for exactly this kind of season; a place to put down what you've been holding so you can actually look at it.
The year is not over yet. There is still time to decide what you want to carry into it.
