Every year, around the second week of January, my inbox fills up.
The messages are all some version of the same thing. “I’ve had enough.” “This year has to be different.” “I spent the whole of Christmas thinking about this and I need to make a change.” And every year I have the same slightly awkward conversation, because by the time somebody messages me in January, they’ve usually already missed the moment when they could see clearly.
Here is what I mean by that.
The clarity you get in summer has a shelf life
Something happens when you get proper distance from work. Not a long weekend, not a few days where you’re still checking email; actual distance, two weeks or more, long enough that your nervous system stops bracing.
In that space, things surface. You notice that you haven’t thought about work in four days and you feel lighter. Or you notice that you have thought about it, constantly, and not in a good way. You notice the specific thing you’re dreading about going back. You notice that when someone asks what you do, you describe it in a flat voice you don’t recognise.
That noticing is enormously valuable, and it is also fragile. Within about three weeks of being back, the volume of ordinary work turns it down. The inbox refills, a project goes sideways, someone leaves and you absorb their work, and the thing you noticed in August becomes a low background hum you’ve learned to live with. It doesn’t go away. It just stops being loud enough to act on.
So you tell yourself you’ll deal with it in January. And then January arrives.
Why January is a genuinely bad month for career decisions
January is the worst possible conditions for a good decision, and we’ve collectively agreed to pretend otherwise because the calendar looks tidy.
You’re tired, because December was not a rest. You’re financially cautious after Christmas. It’s dark. The entire internet is shouting about reinvention at you, which creates pressure rather than clarity. And critically, you’ve been back at work for two or three weeks, so the only version of your job you can remember is the busy one.
Decisions made under that kind of pressure tend to be about escape. Get me out of here, anywhere will do, just something different. And “away from” decisions have a very consistent outcome: people land somewhere new, feel relieved for about four months, and then slowly realise they’ve reproduced the same problem with different colleagues. The room changed. The reason they were uncomfortable in it did not.
There is also a practical point. January is when everybody else applies for things too, so the market is at its most crowded exactly when you’re at your least resourced.
What makes September different
September has almost everything January doesn’t.
You’ve just had distance. This is the big one. You are closer to an honest read on your own working life right now than you will be at any other point in the year, because you’ve just experienced the contrast between your holiday self and your working self. That contrast is data you cannot generate on demand.
You’ve got a year’s worth of evidence. Think about everything that’s happened since last September: the project that lit you up, the one that drained you, the meeting where you realised you’d stopped caring, the piece of feedback that landed harder than it should have, the promotion that felt strangely flat. You’ve been collecting information about yourself all year without filing any of it. September is when it’s still retrievable.
You’ve got four months, which is exactly the right amount of pressure. Four months is enough to do something real: get clear, position yourself properly, have conversations, make a move or make a decision to stay differently. It’s also not enough time to procrastinate elegantly. That combination is unusually productive.
Everyone else is waiting. If you start conversations now, you’re doing it while the market is quieter and while hiring managers are planning next year’s headcount rather than drowning in January applications.
How to use September properly
The instinct, once you’ve decided something needs to change, is to go straight to action. Update the CV. Tell a recruiter. Start applying. Please don’t, at least not yet, because that’s how you end up with a slightly different version of the job you already have.
Do this instead.
Separate the four problems. “I hate my job” is almost never one thing. It’s usually some combination of the work itself, the people and culture, the pace and load, and the purpose of what the organisation is actually doing. Those have four completely different solutions. One of them might be solved with a conversation and a change of team. Another might mean leaving the sector entirely. Work out which one you’re dealing with before you do anything else.
Write down what you noticed, before you forget it. Actual sentences, this week. What you dreaded, what you didn’t miss at all, what you found yourself thinking about on the good days. In three weeks you will genuinely not be able to reconstruct this.
Ask where your definition of success came from. Most people have never checked. You picked a field, and then the people around you in that field set the terms of what a good career looks like, and you’ve been measuring yourself against a scoreboard you never agreed to. Higher, bigger, more. Ask yourself honestly whether you want the next rung or whether you just don’t know what else there is.
Then accept what you find. This is the part almost nobody talks about, and it’s where the real work lives. Figuring out what you want is difficult. Accepting it is harder, especially if what you actually want is quieter, smaller, less impressive or completely sideways from the identity you’ve spent fifteen years building. Insight on its own doesn’t change anything. Insight you’ve made peace with changes everything.
One day, before it fades
This is exactly why I’m running The Autumn Career Reset on Saturday 19 September in Den Haag (The Hague). One full day, capped at 15 people, designed to take everything you noticed this summer and turn it into a written plan while it’s still fresh.
The morning is meditation and energy work with Mel Hillyard, to get the mental noise down, because clarity doesn’t arrive when you’re braced. The afternoon is the career frameworks, the honest self-assessment and your action plan, with dates on it. And there’s two months of follow-up afterwards, because a plan that nobody checks in on is just a nice memory of a Saturday.
Early bird is EUR 95 until 12 September, then EUR 145. Details and booking are here: alicegraves.com/the-autumn-career-reset
And if a room of people isn’t how you’d want to do this, that’s completely fine and it’s more common than you’d think. The same work happens one to one; message me and we’ll talk about it instead.
You’ve got four months left in this year. That’s enough to change everything, but only if you use them while you can still remember why you wanted to.