Most of us assume nature is on our side. We talk about healing walks, calming birdsong, and restorative gardens, as if the outdoors exists to look after us. Rachel Woods, an executive coach who has spent the last five years building a business around thinking in nature, says the opposite is true. Nature doesn’t care whether we live or die. And she thinks that’s exactly why it can help us more than we expect.
Rachel spent sixteen years in senior HR roles before stepping away from corporate life in 2020 to take coaching outdoors full time. She holds a Master’s in Coaching and Behavioural Change, sits on the editorial board of the Journal of Ecopsychology, and wrote ‘Let’s Take This Outside: The Business of Thinking in Nature’, a field guide for using the outdoors to think more clearly. On the latest episode of the Writing with Purpose podcast, Anna talks to Rachel about what it felt like to leave one identity behind for another, why she refuses to steer her clients toward any particular answer, and why nature’s total indifference to us might be the most useful thing about it.
Leaving One Identity Behind for Another
Rachel didn’t wake up one day and decide to quit HR. Her transition built slowly, over years, long before 2020 made it official. Rachel noticed that the variability that once made her job interesting had thinned out and the years began to feel like a perpetual repetition. During this time of uncertainty, she’d fallen back in love with something she’d loved as a child: being outside.
Rachel describes this notion of falling ‘back in love’ with something as a pattern she sees in a lot of people. We grow up, decide we’ve outgrown something, then spend years unconsciously trying to find our way back. For Rachel, that meant studying a postgraduate certificate at Henley, where she noticed she thought more clearly outdoors than indoors. Closely followed by a full MSc, and a mostly unsupported dissertation on coaching and nature, written at a time when almost nothing had been published on the subject.
Rachel is candid that this wasn’t encouraged. The director of her course wasn’t dismissive exactly, just unconvinced it mattered. Years later, the same person is fully behind the idea. Rachel jokes that she’s a pioneer, even if she’s uncredited! And there’s potentially a lesson learned in that building a new professional identity often means working without approval for a long time before anyone else catches up.
Nature’s Indifference, And Why That’s Useful
Partway through the conversation, Rachel makes the claim that nature doesn’t care about us humans. It doesn’t make paths accessible for wheelchairs or walking sticks. It gives wasps no instruction to leave us alone. We’re not the main characters, she says. We’re just another part of the menagerie.
Anna and Rachel both come back to this idea from different angles across the episode, and it never lands as bleak. If anything, it’s a relief. Nature isn’t grading us. It isn’t disappointed in us. It simply is, and we’re welcome to notice it or not. Rachel connects this directly to something in our biology: birdsong and the sound of running water reassure us on a level far older than conscious thought, because somewhere in a very old part of our brain, they signal food, shelter, water, safety. We don’t need nature to like us for it to steady us.
Letting Nature Hand Over the Answer
Rachel’s coaching philosophy rests on one boundary she’s firm about: she never pushes an agenda. If a client wants to talk about making their business greener, she’ll ask what they’re already doing that they could do more of, rather than telling them what to do. The answer, she says, is usually already there. Her job is to create the conditions for someone to notice it themselves, often with nature doing the prompting rather than her.
This shows up in small, concrete ways in Rachel’s work. She talks about bamboo as a metaphor she returns to often with clients: it can sit apparently dormant underground for years before growing rapidly, which makes it a useful way to talk about work that feels invisible before it suddenly isn’t. She talks about rocks and geological time as a way of making someone feel usefully small. None of these metaphors is a neat lesson. They’re simple prompts that let someone arrive at their own conclusion.
Towards the end of the conversation, Anna asks Rachel what she’d want a listener to take from all of this. Her answer is simple: step outside, look properly at what’s there, not what you planted or intended, and let it help you think. Nature may not have the answers written in flowerbeds, but it can give your mind the room to find its own.
Your Turn – The Unsent Letter to a Place
Rachel talks about spaces that hold something for her: the gardens at Henley, the ancient broadleaf woodland near her home, an old rubbish tip being reclaimed as a nature centre. These spaces are not grand, dramatic landscapes necessarily, just places that mattered at a particular point in her life.
This week, try writing an unsent letter to a place that has meant something to you during a transition. It might be somewhere you left, somewhere you arrived, or somewhere ordinary that happened to be nearby while something in your life was amidst change. With the exercise, you are not writing to explain the place to anyone. Write directly to the place. Tell it what you were carrying when you were last there, what you noticed, what it seemed indifferent to, and what it seemed to hold anyway. You never have to send the letter, and you never have to show anyone. The point is simply to notice what a place absorbed on your behalf while you were busy becoming someone slightly different.
Nature was never going to, and never will, look after us. Rachel’s point is that it doesn’t need to, and that not needing it to might be exactly what lets us stop searching outside ourselves for permission to change.
Want to explore what nature can teach us about identity, transition and trusting our own instincts? Listen to the full conversation with Rachel Woods on Episode 78 of the Writing with Purpose podcast.