Two of my magnolia trees got hit with scale this year. If you’ve never dealt with it, here’s how sneaky it is. It turns out, they picked up a pest called scale. It is small, sneaky, and easy to miss until the damage is already done. By the time I noticed something was wrong, it had been happening for a while.

It made me think about how it goes for so many of my clients too. Nobody wakes up one day and suddenly decides they are burnt out or lost in their career. It builds slowly. We get busy and don’t notice how unhappy we are until it feels really big and impossible to change. A job that stopped fitting. A version of themselves they created to get by. By the time they come to coaching, they are standing in front of the damage, wondering how they missed it for so long.

You do not wake up one day and decide you are unhappy. You wake up one day and finally see it, feel it, and can’t continue to do it any longer.

Here is what I tell my clients, and what I’m doing for my magnolias too. You do not have to know exactly how you got here to start treating it. You don’t even have to know where to start. What you need is to notice something is happening and be willing to do the unglamorous work of healing it, branch by branch.

What have you been ignoring that deserves your attention today? What are you willing to do to make a change?