How to Create Momentum for the New Year

If it seems like we get no rest around year's end, it's because we don't.

When was the last time you had a sense of down time or head space having completed one year's goals and objectives before getting handed your next set?

If it seems like the only thanks you get for achieving a year's worth of objectives is next year's objectives, it’s because typically that's the way organisations work. It's also the way our own brains operate. We are quick to discount the magnitude of our goals once we achieve them. And that's the case across all aspects of our lives.

Organisations don't tend to give people time to rest on their achievements, so as soon as one performance cycle is complete, you're being asked to set up the next one. Which is not to say that your achievements aren't rewarded. But reward, while important doesn't always create the momentum we need to create to get going again in January.

Reflecting on my own difficulties in getting started each January and conversations on the topic with others, here are two (unscientific) ideas:

Take a thing you never do and do it

It doesn't matter what this is. It just needs to be something that you don't do now or have told yourself you wouldn't do or something that you tell yourself is just not you.

Take the thing and do it. You might do this once. It might be something that gets done once a week, once a month, but whatever it is, the point is to do something new and different and see what happens as a result.

Doing new and different things stimulates your brain. The novelty of the thing and the fact the thing isn't your usual thing all help kickstart new thinking, experience and identity.

Quick examples include:

• Read a writer who you don't already know or better still, think you won't like.

• Ditto for all sorts of cultural works and events.

• Pack your January diary full of meetings - if that's not your usual January.

• Ditto for anything else you avoid doing in January

Take a thing you always do and do it differently

This one is easier to get started on in January because it accesses your existing routine and tweaks it.

• Take a different route to a daily destination.

• Take a different mode of transport.

• Get your coffee from a different place.

• Eat a different lunch.

• Talk to different people.

Happy New Year!