New year, same you.
Mitch King
Talent Acquisition at Fleet Space | Space-enabled technology to revolutionise mineral discovery, defence capabilities, and space exploration
How many of us have set New Years resolutions at some point in our lives?
How many of those have then failed those New Years resolutions in the first month?
????♂?
Although I'm not a huge fan of NYR's in general (why wait for an arbitrary date to make changes? Do whatever it is you want to do now, not Jan 1) I have seen a lot of people use the new year marker as the start of the rest of their career.
Jan 1 they're going to leave their crappy job and get a job at their dream company.
Jan 1 they're going to stop slacking off at work and get that raise and promotion.
Jan 1 they're going to exercise more which will give them more energy to work and make them a better employee.
By the time they get to the end of January, they're often already starting to make plans to push the resolutions to next year.
Of course it would be extremely pessimistic of me to say that no one sticks to these resolutions and no one improves, I'm not saying that. I'm only talking about the other 97% that end up pretending that those resolutions were never made and go back to ground hog day.
This is the main question I want to ask - should we focus on accepting our flaws and embracing our strengths or should we focus on fixing our flaws?
Maybe a lot of us are setting the wrong types of resolutions regardless of the date we're setting them. We're highlighting the things we dislike the most about ourselves rather than paying any sort of attention to what we like most about ourselves and what we're best at.
I don't hear many people say they're going to focus on getting better at what they're already good at. It's always fixing something or filling in a gap.
But again, why does this specific date have such an importance to starting these changes? What's wrong with a Jan 14 resolution?
It's less catchy for sure but it seems like NYR are just another commercial holiday (Valentines day, I'm looking directly at you) for self help books, journals, fitness & diet programs to tap into your weaknesses at your weakest moment - a week after you've been only consuming ham, beer and prawns and barely know what day it is.
Regardless of what resolutions you did or didn't set or have already failed, don't wait for Jan 1, 2025 to make the next change. Especially those of you in jobs you hate with no light at the end of the tunnel.
Don't rage quit but start making steps for a change. Get the resume together. Reach out to your favourite ex-colleagues. Start that course this afternoon.
If nothing changes, nothing changes.
Founder at Workpants | Career Counselling for Parents and Workplaces
1 年I am a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. It’s not the only time I make changes but I find the artificial deadline really powerful. Maybe the issue is the how and not the what. Someone clever on here recently shared that a great approach is to treat them as experiments, where learning and adjusting are a natural part of the process and don’t represent defeat. If it’s ~10% of these beauties that actually stick then that’s still a lot of good stuff to put into the world, provided your resolutions are the honourable kind!
Leadership development for bold businesses | HR coach & author | this is work podcast
1 年Next time can we collab on these articles and pool resources ?????? https://amp.smh.com.au/business/workplace/what-should-you-achieve-in-2024-more-of-the-same-20240111-p5ewm8.html
Software Engineering Leader | Driven by a Passion for Problem Solving
1 年Well this year 250kg deadlift, 220 squad, 157.5 bench press. So you wrong :P