What is January for anyway?

January has been a month of “circling back” after pushing everything into the new year, of launching new things left, right and centre.

New goals. New roadmaps. New budgets… and the relentless momentum for more continues.

This feels totally out of sync with the season and our collective energy levels – and I’m wondering if you’ve felt it too?

So I’d like to propose a different way of doing things.

And to do that I’m going to tell you a tale of two halves: of looking back and looking forward, of extreme highs and lows.

LOOKING BACK

It turns out that 2025 was a pretty big year for me.

I hadn’t really registered this until I finally sat down, did my Year Compass at the end of December and wrote everything down.

Prior to this, I had somehow managed to get it into my head that 2025 was a year of catching up after a health scare midway through. I thought I was in some way behind, that I was recovering rather than “progressing”.

And although my rational brain knows the importance of rest, I still measure myself against output far more than I’d like to admit.

So I was genuinely surprised when I discovered that the past 12 months had actually been hugely expansive for me – creatively, personally and professionally.

When I mapped out my year, I discovered that pretty much every month (apart from summer…) something big happened.

• In january I went away with my co-founder to do our first business strategy away day.
• In february I finished the first draft of a book i’d been writing for five years.
• In march I moved house.
• In april I started a club night with some DJ friends.
• In may I launched a tiktok and youtube channel to support young men and stem the flow to the alt-right.
• In june, I went on an adventure to Peru and had to be rushed to emergency surgery halfway through our trek as my appendix was about to burst…
• In july and august I recovered from the operation.
• In september we moved into our new office and hired our first employee.
• In october I produced a couple of dance tracks and had them professionally mastered for the first time, playing them out at our club night.
• In november I finished a dungeons and dragons campaign I had been running for eight years.
• In december I adopted kittens.

The near death experience halfway through really disrupted my flow… and somewhere along the way I convinced myself that I hadn’t done much at all. That although I’d had a strong start to the year, the rest of it was spent simply recovering.

I remember saying that I “missed my spark”. I missed the momentum I felt I’d had at the start of the year.

I had thought that 2025 was a season of maintenance, but actually, I was in a season of doing, growth and creative output – just one with a significant interruption in the middle.

On reflection, maybe my lack of perspective and distorted sense of reality was also down to exhaustion.

So, as I drew the year to a close, inevitably my mind started thinking about 2026 and what was to come…

LOOKING FORWARD

As you can probably tell, I love nothing more than the disciplined pursuit of a good goal. So you’d think after all that reflection I’d be ready to set some new goals for the year.

Unfortunately not.

As someone who hibernates over the winter months each year and then blossoms in spring (I like to think of myself as a flower in this way…) I find the idea of “new year’s resolutions”, of starting something new in January, rather difficult.

In the winter months my energy is low.

The darkness lingers in the mornings and comes quickly in the evenings, the cold slows everything down and the days feel closer.

During this time, particularly from late december through january, I find myself wanting to stay in – either curled up on the sofa watching films or hidden away in my cave playing video games.

I become a bit of a hermit.

And I’ve learnt not to fight it anymore; I now embrace it.

I’ll sometimes even text my friends to say that I still love them but that i’m going in hibernation…

Then as soon as the days start to lengthen and the sunlight returns, something shifts in me.

I feel my energy return, along with my creativity, motivation and joie de vivre ✨

So as someone who LOVES personal growth and creative energy, I just wish the “new year, new me” energy aligned with the right season for it!

(Maybe the taxman got one thing right with their April start! 😵)

This seems to be true not only in my personal life but also in organisational culture.

We live in a world where electricity can power our work 24-7 and constant connectivity means we can communicate all the time, but we’ve lost touch with something fundamental to humanity: the natural ebb and flow of our energy that mirrors the seasons.

From Jan to June to September and December we work the same hours and expect the same output, regardless of the waning light outside and within.

Yet it’s only since the advent of the light bulb that we’ve been able to do this. To flatten the ups and downs of the seasons and turn what should be a circle into a line.

The world of business was not designed to work with our natural circadian rhythm – and I wonder what it would look like to work in sync with our energy.

How much happier and, dare I say, even productive we might be across the year for giving ourselves the rest we need.

So what if we treated January differently? What if it were a month for rest and reflection and not of energy and action?

This “go, go, go” mentality that demands constant output doesn’t create better work. It leads to burnout and it stunts our creativity.

So I’ve decided january isn’t about new ideas and new me’s.

It’s for resting, reflecting and knowing that in spring i’ll blossom again.