Even though today is the first day of the year, you’ve likely been seeing a lot of content these past few weeks about the start of a new year, goal-setting, setting intentions, and themes or words for the year.

In my experience, there are two main reactions:

• bring it on
• ignore all the chatter

I’m curious to hear which one feels true for you right now...

The Fresh Start Effect

It turns out, significant dates like New Year’s Day, your birthday, a new semester, holidays, moving, etc. act as landmarks in your brain. They create mental time periods marking the start of a new phase. Research on the Fresh Start Effect suggests people are more aspirational during these times, and they associate their imperfections with the past period.

It’s effectively a clean slate where mistakes are behind you and potential is in front of you.

Now, it’s a common argument that dates like January 1st are arbitrary and you can start fresh any day, but these dates are a notable interruptions to your day-to-day life. This pattern interruption tends to prompt reflection about where you are now and where you’d like to go.
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Directing Your Attention

The past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about the types of attention described by James Williams in his book Stand Out of Our Light (open source).

Spotlight Attention is your capacity to focus on the task at hand. It’s about doing the immediate thing in front of you, like reading this email.

Starlight Attention is your capacity to live life according to your values and goals. It’s about walking an intentional path according to your “north star”.

Daylight Attention is your capacity to reflect on what path you want to walk. It’s asking questions about what you value, your goals, and how you want to live.

Put more simply:

• Spotlight is Doing (doing what we want to do)
• Starlight is Being (being who we want to be)
• Daylight is Knowing (knowing what we want)

So when it’s the start of a new period and you are more likely to pause and reflect, it’s an opportunity to tap into your Daylight Attention. In doing this, you are asking what you want.

• What are your values?
• What are your goals?
• What’s your north star?
• Have you veered off track?
• What actions will keep you aligned?

When you know what you want and who you want to be, it can guide what you do on a daily basis.
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Creating Space

In my experience, tapping into your Daylight Attention requires space.

For me, that’s both mental space and physical space. At times this looks like sitting down with a pen and paper near a window with natural light. Other times it’s on a long solo car ride recording a voice note.

You likely know which physical and mental spaces are best suited for you to ask these bigger questions. So if you are feeling the pull of the Fresh Start Effect but aren’t sure where to begin, I encourage you to lean into your Daylight capacity and reflect on what you want so you can be who you want to be, and do what you want to do.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

Cheers,
Cat

P.S. I have a couple of spaces left for Momentum Coaching starting in January. If you are curious if it's good fit right now and have questions for me, simply reply to this email.

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