The New Year is only days away. Regardless of your religious affiliations through the rest of the holiday season, the celebration of the New Year is considered wildly important. We see the new year as a chance to explore new aspects of ourselves and to engage new habits.
Each one of us views the New Year differently. There are at least four different forms of how we view the shift to the New Year. Each of them represents a different kinds of changes.
Where does the New Year and business engage? Well, beyond trite promises about your business life, any change you make to yourself will inherently affect your work life. We’re not truly able to disengage one aspect of our selves from another. The business bleeds in to the personal and the personal in to the business. What can we do about this? Seek to make the changes affect both our personal and business sphere.
Over the next few posts I’ll talk more about specific kinds of changes we can make but for now we’ll look at the general forms of promises we make to ourselves.
I or Thou
The first most basic distinction we make in our promises is whether they regard us intrinsically or how we regard others. Frequently people make promises about personal behavior. Other times the promises are in regards to others. Really, the two dance together but our rationalization is different. First determine whether or not you are looking to change something within yourself or something about how you work with others. Wanting to treat others better is different than seeking to have more thanks for their efforts.
Editing
We clutter our lives on a daily basis. Each day brings new burdens, trivialities and items with which we bury our lives. Each item, time constraint or strain on our mind detracts from our ability to live a rewarding life. People seeking to edit their lives look to take away the things that distract from the important. They want to focus on what is important and rid themselves of the things which cloud their visions. Whether this is bad relationships, bad work, distracting habits, limiting lifestyles, each item they can sheer off their backs leaves them more free to pursue a rewarding year.
Revolution
Some are looking for a more radical approach to their New Year. Perhaps they are unhappy, perhaps they are just more experimental. Regardless, these individuals seek to tear out the entire interior of their lives and create something entirely new. A new job, a new place to live, a new outlook. They want to change everything and move into a new stage of their life. A word of warning, huge life changes often can’t be timed like this, you may find yourself forcing too much. However, it is a good time to get the wheels moving. An entirely new track may jar you from your current business life, but it may also set you on a brilliant new one.
Focusing
People who are essentially looking to hone their attentions will take things they are already doing: progressing in a new career, working on a big project, losing weight, learning a new language, and redouble their efforts. Many people are generally happy with their lives, their status. When they look forward to a new year, they look to make minor changes. Perhaps they look to decrease their weight slightly or change their eating habits. They want to tone down their usage of social media or make an effort to re-learn a foreign language. Whatever their goal, they are usually easily achievable. Some people point out that focusing and editing are relatively similar. However, they are not. They have a few basic differences but the biggest one is that focusing looks at increasing time spent on some things while editing does the opposite, it focuses on how you can eliminate.
These obviously aren’t the only ways you can approach the New Year, but they are the most common themes. Seek to find ways to bring both your personal promises together with your business self. Next we’ll look at individual promises you can make to yourself and how they can help you approach a New Year and new you.
