At the end of every year and the start of another, huge numbers of people from around the world get onboard with the tradition of New Year’s Resolutions — and find strength, optimism, and personal agency and power in the idea of getting a fresh start.
While New Year’s Resolutions often end up focusing on things like starting up a new diet or personal fitness regimen, or letting go of a bad habit, however, the same basic principle behind New Year’s Resolutions — namely, the promise of getting a fresh start — can be extremely powerful in your professional life, too.
Whether you’re thinking of starting a new side-career making videos and are researching how to add music to imovie, or want to take up coding, here are some of the benefits of a professional fresh start.
A great excuse to experience new things and to think outside the box
Creativity, innovation, and the ability to think outside of the box are all remarkably powerful things in a business context, and many companies rely on these skills in order to not only establish great profit margins, but also in order to establish an enduring legacy.
The more entrenched you become in a particular mode of viewing and thinking about things, however, the less creative and innovative you are likely to be. Certainly, staying in the same professional context for too long may stifle creativity.
Getting a professional fresh start can enable you to better think outside of the box and experience new things.
An opportunity to do a habit-overhaul
While big, one-off actions can sometimes have a massive and permanent impact on both your personal and professional life (in good ways and in bad ways) — the fact is that most of the outcomes you experience will tend to be associated with your habits, instead.
Negative habits, in a professional context, can really sink your ability to thrive and make a difference in your industry, or to capitalise on opportunities that come your way.
Getting a professional fresh start gives you an opportunity to essentially “start from scratch” with regards to your professional habits, and to take a more mindful approach to how you meet each day and the opportunities and challenges it contains.
A chance to become excited about your career again
In all likelihood, not a single person one earth would prefer to feel unenthusiastic about their career if they had a choice, or to do something that they found dull, meaningless, or negative.
Unfortunately, however, a very substantial number of people do in fact lead what the writer Henry David Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation,” particularly with regard to their work.
If you find that you are no longer enthusiastic about what you do for a living — or perhaps never were in the first place — getting a professional fresh start can serve as a golden opportunity to once again be excited about your career, to focus on a subject, job, or industry that feels meaningful to you, and to put aside past frustrations and setbacks.
Ultimately, your enthusiasm for your career will tend to serve as a great indicator of whether or not you are doing something that is properly aligned with your deeper values and interests, and which can help you to thrive and do your best work on a routine basis.
A chance to learn from past mistakes and experience, and to apply the lessons you’ve accumulated effectively
Success in a professional context — and especially in an entrepreneurial context — is almost always incremental. That is to say, setbacks are inevitable, and your ability to be ultimately successful in your field will tend to have a lot more to do with how capable you are of learning and improving as you go along, than with “nailing it” on the first try.
Many leading entrepreneurial giants — such as Richard Branson — have dozens of failed businesses to their names, in addition to their most notable success stories.
These setbacks should not be viewed as signs of “defeat,” but rather as integral learning moments that have to be properly understood and incorporated into your professional vision and approach going forward.
At the same time, however, it is normally quite different to break free from our habitual ways of doing things, and to take on a totally new approach — as our past outlooks and approaches will naturally tend to have their own established “momentum.”
Getting a professional fresh start — particularly by starting up a new business, or job, or radically transforming how you approach things in the context of your current business or job, can serve as an invaluable opportunity for adjusting course and applying the lessons you have learned up to this point.