OK I’ll admit it — I became a Winter Oympics junkie, sitting in my living room totally into watching the amazing feats of these athletes. One athlete in particular captured my imagination, Lindsey Vonn the women’s downhill skier.

As I listened to her story and watched her compete, I couldn’t help but get a few life lessons from Lindsey and her gold medal victory.

I’ve been fretting and fumbling around with a situation with seemingly no easy solution.

Last night a solution appeared in the form of a dream. My dream was about Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and she was clicking on her ruby slippers three times.

Winter tends to get a bad rap! Everyone is always into Spring and Summer with buds bursting open, greenery everywhere, and a feeling of newness. Winter just doesn’t have these energies.

Last week I had a coffee date with a childhood friend last week and we got to talking about our kids growing up and the inevitable question of “what’s next”. So many women that I talk to, both clients and friends, seem to be wanting to put themselves in a new direction rather than go back to their professional life before kids.

We’ve all heard the saying “the only constant is change.” However, when change lands on our doorstep we are usually bewildered and uncertain of where and how we will land on solid ground again.

This season has been all about shedding and getting rid of, an activity that I’ve traditionally thought of as “spring cleaning”. The key question to ask yourself is, “what am I doing that no longer serves me?”

So, no job. Or you are scared to death as a new retiree because you don’t know where next to move. If you are an introvert, the pressure may be more intensified, since the fear of networking can be as frightening as job loss. Well, maybe not quite as scary as having no job, no but scary enough to render some of you ineffective and, perhaps immobile.

Fall always brings to my mind fall foliage, back to school, and the story of the pilgrims with the very first Thanksgiving. Fall is traditionally known as a time of harvest, of gathering the bounty for the coming winter.

I went to a networking meeting in NYC at The Transition Network last month and I found it inspiring to be surrounded by a group of women who are actively choosing to reinvent themselves—and the ages of these women are 50+ to 80.

Laura told me she had recently attended a seminar at the aquarium about the evolution of salmon, which are among the most adaptive of fish. They swim many miles upstream to spawn and then die, while the juveniles swim back out to sea to begin the cycle again. Only the most hardy survive, as they adapt to the challenging journey. Her instructor had included a reference to Charles Darwin, who famously postulated that the animal species must adapt, migrate or die, just as the salmon do. Adapt, migrate or die has become her mantra for the future.