Happy New Year! l wanted to share some thoughts as you begin to plan around the changes and growth you may wish to experience in the year ahead.

Our lives can sometimes feel like we’re on a treadmill, which can be quite hard work. But imagine for a moment that, like a very expensive treadmill, you can speed up, slow down, change the incline, distance and terrain in your life – how different could it be? Because you can and you already have at various points in your life.

By actively setting out to manage your life, intentionally designing it for your skills, your uniqueness, your energy, purpose and passion, you can design a ‘treadmill’ that nobody can compete with you on.

Successful people are masters of reflection

Reflection as a tool is a powerful enabler when we are honest about what we want or need to change, and when we have the right motivation. Whether in professional sport, business or personal life, the most successful people in the world share a common trait – they are masters of reflective practice.

This is how they continually perform at the highest levels and sustain their performance and mental health. Their ability to reflect and adapt from their learnings gives them an evolutionary edge.

As you go into the New Year, many of you will have thought about resolutions, changes and goals you’d like to achieve or make in your personal and/or work life. Some of these will be deeply personal, while others will be the more usual things, such as making improvements in areas like losing weight, eating better, or getting a promotion at work.

In order to reach these decisions, you might work through a variety of methods and techniques, but essentially you will be using the process of reflection to help choose a better or more desirable future.

Instead of going into 2023 with a ‘new year, new me’ attitude, why not strive to become a better version of your current self? One way in which we can all make a conscious effort to improve our wellbeing is with regard to our mental health.

While the statistic pre-Covid was one in four people, this year more like one in three people in the UK will experience a mental health condition or episode. The personal costs of this are huge, as are those to family and communities.

For various reasons, awareness, treatment and prevention of mental health conditions are often limited via health services. I believe there is also a need for more support and effort focusing on the prevention of mental health conditions in business.

Improvements with mental health in the workplace

Thankfully, there has been a shifting regulatory landscape when it comes to workplace mental health, despite society in general lagging behind. The key change is that, if not already, businesses will soon be required to apply a risk management approach to psychological health and safety.

This is an exciting development in the world of work and I would encourage those of you in decision-making positions to encourage this process.

By intentionally taking control of your life, you can build your own treadmill. Remember, your life is your field of play! My departing question for you to consider is, “What does your treadmill look like?”