It’s magical thinking season!

First off please let me wish you a very Happy New Year and share my warmest wishes that 2026 is your best year yet, in whatever aspects of life you'd like to maintain, enhance, or develop this year.

My intention with this article is to share a proven approach for helping you make real, meaningful and lasting impact as you progress through the year.

New Year always brings out a range of magical thinking from the self-help industry. You know the sort of thing, you’ll be bombarded with just wish it, and you can manifest anything you want… Just visualize it hard enough, with enough detail, and frequently enough and it will happen. That million £ grant, no need to do any preliminary work to demonstrate viability, no need to draft out ways of explaining the ideas and test those draft on colleagues, no need to build collaborations to cover capability, or knowledge gaps, just dream hard enough and it will magically happen! These utterances just set people up for failure, and feeling bad about themselves when change doesn't occur, or doesn't stick!

Visualization is indeed a powerful tool, it helps athletes enhance their muscle memory (measurable change in neural pathways has been demonstrated repeatedly), speakers perform with more power and audience connection. At the base level shifting thinking or reframing a problem, is also extremely important. But just wishing, or changing your thinking alone won’t create change. The most powerful, rapid and irreversible progress comes from combining specific actions with reframing whatever way of thinking you have been stuck in, switching to a growth oriented positive way of addressing the issue.

If you're been struggling to change a specific habit, or problem try this:

First, reframe your approach to the problem, but be cautious to adopt a realistic, growthful, framing of the issue, rather than a positive, but still fixed mindset; you're too clever for that, your mind will see through it!  For example, I'll never be not good enough to apply for XYZ fellowship, to of course I'm the ideal candidate, the panel are bound to award this fellowship to me. Yes the latter is positive, but it will also create blind spots in preparing your application, and deepen the sense of failure, rejection and shame if you are unsuccessful! The more complex growth orientated mindset of I am learning all the time, I can work hard to develop then showcase the skills, talents and ideas that an excellent fellowship candidate needs will serve you better in terms of the quality of the application, your chances of success, and how you develop as a result of the application process.

On top of a growth orientated, positive approach mindset develop a pathway of actions that help you to implement that approach.  Actions might include mini experiments to test what can help you move forward, or might include specific skill development, or new ways of behaving in difficult contexts.  In the case of a fellowship application being proactive to share ideas early with trusted mentors, and to seek a range of input in phases to strengthen the application, without flip flopping between wildly different viewpoints.  By taking an experimental approach all results, or feedback are just data points; they are not personal successes, or failures, just information to help you move forward and guidance to keep moving in the intended direction (or change direction!), wherever the pathway leads towards your desired outcome.

If you’re looking to make significant progress in 2026, or finally unstick an issue that has caused you stress in 2025 expect the experience to be slightly uncomfortable, especially if the shift is to be irreversible. Expect to need courage to challenge your ways of thinking about the situation, and who you are being in those moments. As well as courage to take action to grow your skills, capabilities, and capacities. A system has to go through a chaotic phase before it can resettle to a higher level of performance.

If you want to make big changes this year you’ll succeed when you combine new, growth-oriented ways of thinking about the situation with specific actions to shift how its working out for you. Good luck, and if you want someone independent to support you, to champion you, to challenge you, to hold you accountable you might find what you’re looking for amongst our coaching services.