Getting Curious about Endings, Beginnings and Designing the Start of a New Year

Greetings and Happy New Year, Friends,

Because of my work in and with schools, I always consider myself lucky to have not just one “new year” but two. If you are reading this, you probably work in schools and also enjoy this luxury. One “new year” happens as we enter a new school year in the fall. Depending on where you are in the country or world, you might celebrate that occasion sometime between July and September. The second happens as we flip our Gregorian calendars to January 1 for a fresh start to the 365 days ahead. The first, for me, always feels like a professional demarcation and a time when I might set goals for work and get my office in order. While the second is really an opportunity to reflect more deeply on the personal, knowing, of course, that these two aspects of my life are deeply intertwined and one influences the other. So here we are, at the end of one calendar year and beginning the next.

I’m always curious about how I and others end one year and begin another. For me, it is essential to close down one year before I can start another one with any intention. I need to put the previous year to rest, hold it up, examine it, identify the learnings (many of which come from the things that didn’t go so well) and appreciate the parts of the year that brought me the most joy. There were a number of really wonderful things about 2024, including celebrating the 10th anniversary of L+D, a spontaneous trip to the Bahamas with my husband, my much anticipated high school reunion, my oldest daughter’s college graduation, and seeing my youngest daughter perform the lead in the school musical. But I found myself wondering why it all felt a little flat, why I felt a little flat. 2024 for me was, as my kids like to say, “mid.” Perfectly fine but lacking a technicolor brilliance. Wasn’t this the year I was going to go “all in” as I claimed as my phrase for the year? Where had I gone wrong in failing to keep that promise to myself?

This year I did this end of year reflection at the laundromat. Our dryer at home was broken, so amidst the swishing and whirring of washers and dryers, I paid my respects to 2024 and processed my feelings about the year. It was both a literal and figurative clean start to 2025.

So here I am on the other side, ready to mark the beginning of a new year with the same intentionality I ended the last one. For me, a long list of resolutions doesn’t work, but I do pick a word or a phrase that I can latch onto. This year, my word is vibrancy. By selecting this word, am I simply chasing what I could not achieve last year, or is it that through my reflection I realized what was missing and now I have a chance to adjust? I’m not sure I have decided yet, but my singular ambition for the year is to try and do things that bring color and radiance to my work, my relationships, and my side hobbies and recreational pursuits. I believe how I start the year makes a difference, and if you do too, I hope the following suggestions might be helpful.

As experience designers at Leadership+Design, we often talk about the importance of beginnings and endings when we design our programs, services and gatherings of all types for our network. It’s not that what happens in the middle doesn’t matter, but starts and endings have a significant impact on the success of an experience and also how we feel about the experience when we look back on it. Priya Parker in her book Art of Gathering has a whole chapter dedicated to beginnings called “Never start a funeral with logistics.” I’ve often felt that Parker’s suggestions for commencing gatherings can be applied to how to start a new year, so I’ve adapted some of her lessons below. Consider the new year as a “gathering of one” - an experience that you are creating for yourself. You are both the host and the guest of this new year.

1. Plan Ahead: According to Parker and crediting her friend Randa Slim, a conflict resolution specialist, “90 percent of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand.” The year’s success is largely dependent on the planning you do ahead of time. Suggestions 2-4 below are all part of the planning. 

2. Name your year. Remember the1982 movie “The Year of Living Dangerously”? There was also the book The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs.  Maybe these are extreme examples, but what would be the title of the year you want to have? Maybe you, like me, have a word or phase for your year. Having a name you can return to might make you more intentional about the things you choose to do this year. Let that name be a source of imagination.

3. Prime the pump: It’s only January 9 and not too late to prime and prepare for the year ahead. You are only on day 9 of 365! Priming the pump may look like some short homework assignments or readings for the upcoming year. Use your chosen name for your year to guide some of this priming. One of my priming rituals is to make a “More and Less” List. How can my year be more _____________ and less ____________. What do I want more and less of in the year ahead?

4. Create a Contract with Yourself: Parker talks about gatherings as social contracts - an understanding between the host and the guests. What is your contract with yourself this year? What will you ask yourself to do and what will you GET to do because you have been given permission and an invitation to do it?

5. Launch Boldly: Once you have named, primed and committed, get ready to launch. These first few weeks of the year do a few bold things that set a tone for the year. Get yourself out of your comfort zone. This is personal so don’t base your “bold” on someone else’s. But consider something you haven’t done before, something visceral, that will be a touchstone that you can return to as you get further into the year. 

6. Don’t start with the To Do list. As the title of the Priya Parker chapter suggests, don’t start with logistics. “It's a failure to live up to what we imagine would be best.” That list of tasks can come later. Act your way into new ways of being. Act your way into that contract rather than think or write your way in. Sometimes we have to actually do the thing, not just write about how we will do it.  

This year I’m starting with three January challenges that I selected specifically to help me kick off my “Year of Vibrancy.” These are three ways I am trying to act my way into a more vibrant year, and they are all in service of experiencing my year with more technicolor brilliance.  This is not a “new year, new me” endeavor, but one that is specifically focused on an aspect of my personal and professional life that I want to experience differently.

1. A 30 day no-sugar reset. This is something I have never done before. It feels sufficiently hard - as someone who lives and dies for a good loaf of bread and deeply appreciates a craft cocktail. Inspired by our teammate Ryan who did it last year, a few of us are joining him. The goal for me is to clear my mind and body of the dopamine sugar-fix and to learn something about how food impacts me. It is also to slow down and pay attention to what I am eating and notice how it feels to both eat and not eat certain things. 

2. The 30 day Draw Together Challenge with artist Wendy MacNaugton and her “Grown Up Table” Community. It’s just 10 minutes of drawing everyday. I did this last year and it made my whole year better. This year I am using more color for all of my drawings. I have my watercolor set out, and I am trying to really see what is in front of me in vivid color. I have no artistic training and am a chronic amateur, but this challenge forces me to create and to do things I am not very good at doing. A couple of my creations from this year are below. I’m hoping to keep it up all year with Wendy’s weekly posts, but I won’t be too hard on myself if I don’t.

3. Lastly, I am off all social media until February. With the exception of “snap chatting” my children and posting my Draw Together images to Substack, I have totally abstained from Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and X and am focusing on humans IRL. People in real life are much messier and complex and far less curated and polished. I like them without the filter so much more.

Not everyone uses January as a reset moment, but if you do, I’d love to hear how you are beginning your year and how you are designing an intentional experience for yourself. 

And I wish you all a vibrant 2025.