Welcome to the first edition of The Inbox Coach in 2021, a monthly email to bring you a little bit of coaching to your inbox and help you to make time for your personal development. This month I am thinking about what we can do to create a fresh start in our work.

I love New Year. I think it’s mostly because I love getting a new diary (a justified stationery purchase) which is blank with possibility, and it feels like I can have a fresh start. It is a chance to think about how far I have come in my career, reassess what I want from my work, to challenge assumptions about what is possible and to start the year with a new perspective.

In a coaching session I create a space for my clients to think about their situation. They reflect on what has gone before, look to the future to take an action and I challenge them to think about their situation in a new way and to be curious about what is possible. These same conditions, reflection, action, challenge and possibility are all there in the run up to New Year and I think it is why this is a time of year when people re-evaluate what they want from their careers, it gives us the perfect conditions we need to think about our goals.

New year, new you?

Whilst I love New Year, I am not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. I see the work you do to develop in your career as something to be worked on every day, so any changes you are going to make will be small incremental shifts to take you towards your goals, rather than something that you only focus on at the start of the year. What I do love is the collective feeling that making a change is possible. We can often feel powerless to make change, but the new year heralds an opportunity.

When I think about the plans I want to make for the year ahead, rather than thinking I have to start completely from scratch I think of how I can refresh what I already have. I like to think of it as a manuscript. Over the course of the year you have made lots of revisions and edits to your career and you now need to type up the next draft so that you can see where you are at and start the process again.

We all lead very busy lives; our working day can be full before you start to think about your longer-term career plans and where you want to be. Taking this moment to take a step back and think about the bigger picture of your career helps you to quiet the noise of the day to day and listen to what you need. It is a chance to let go of things that are no longer serving you, not because you were wrong before but because the world changes, people change, you change. What you once needed to work towards is done and there are new things to pursue. What you once thought wasn’t possible for you now may be in reach. You have grown and developed as a person and you have new skills to take on new challenges.

A fresh start

It’s easier to create this feeling at the start of a new year as you don’t have to engineer the conditions yourself, but I don’t believe this is the only time it can happen. I get the same feeling in September when we go “back to school” after a summer of differing routines. I also get it when I start a new notebook (a literal blank page where I can let go of the clutter of previous to do lists) or even journaling before the start of my working week. Every day we wake up with the possibility of a fresh start, to approach our work with a different mindset, all we have to do is take it.

Reflection

*If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when are going to do it and add this email to your calendar

Giving yourself a fresh start in your career isn’t about throwing away all that has gone before, but rather looking at all the positive things you have and want to keep and swapping the things that aren’t working for new ideas. Sometimes the changes will be small, a shift in mindset towards a difficult colleague or clearer work/life boundaries, and other times they will be huge, such as going for a promotion or changing sectors.

To give yourself a fresh start in your career ask yourself…

What is working well for me that I want to keep doing?

What is no longer serving me that I need to let go of?

What new things do I want to bring into my work?

Write your answers down in your journal and spend some time thinking about what your fresh start looks like.  

Action

Giving yourself a fresh start when it comes to your career allows you to let go of the assumptions and beliefs that are no longer serving you and to decide where you want your focus to be. We tend not to notice how far we have come when we are in the middle of the day to day and we can surprise ourselves by what we have achieved when we take the time to think about it. 

Task

Write down any assumptions or beliefs you have about your career that are no longer serving you. Think about what you are able to do now that these things are no longer true.

If you can’t do the exercises from this email now, then don’t forget to pick a time when are going to do it and add the prompts in this email to your calendar.

Inspiration 

“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over.” – Marina Keegan

Marina Keegan was a brilliant writer whose life was cut short when she was killed in a car accident aged 22, just 5 days after graduating from Yale in 2012. Her writing was collated into a book, The Opposite of Loneliness, which was published posthumously. Her writing covers essays and stories but they are all filled with hope and an appreciation for the small but truly important things in life. Her book and her story remind us how fragile life can be. Every day that we wake up, we get to have a fresh start at life. Even if it is just shifting a mindset or letting go of a mistake we have made, we get to show up each day and do the work we were meant to do.

You can read the title essay from the book and find out more about Marina here. 

I hope that you have been able to have rest over the Christmas break and feel that 2021 is an opportunity for a fresh start. If you are looking for some support in refreshing your career this year I would love to work with you to help you to create a career you love. My Career Action Plan session is a 60 minute conversation to help you to clarify your career goals and then put a plan in place to make them happen. You get a bespoke action plan and worksheets, as well as accountability email follow up. Find out more and book your session here. 

I’ll be back next week with more tips on how to create a fresh start in your career 

See you then

Laura

P.S. I’ve listed all the previous editions of The Inbox Coach emails on my website which you can find here. Each email has reflection questions and action tasks, so if you need to revisit a topic you can now browse them all in one place