It’s the end of the first week in the New Year.

How did you face the change and challenge that the New Decade heralded? Was it with trepidation? With hopes and dreams? With wild resolutions that even as you spoke them out you knew would fail? What would happen if even now, you just paused and drew breath before you did anything else?

Victor Frankl states: ‘Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to change. In our response lies our growth and our freedom’.

To pause is to wait, to hold back, to take a break and to breathe. What may you find in the pause? Your thoughts, confusion, dreams? Your imposter who sneaks in and utters, ‘not you surely?’ Within the pause, lies the route clarity and wisdom. It is through the confusion that you discover your best self. Yourself that dreams, embracing possibilities that you might just make it. It is as you face yourself, as in a mirror that you can reflect (no pun intended) on how far you have come and how you managed it.

‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.’ Rumi. Who do you think you are?

As an executive coach I often find myself working with those who are successful but stressed. Fulfilled but empty. Productive but preoccupied. It is only as you set time aside to understand and look beyond the assumptions that have been made about you. And that you made about yourself. That it is possible to rediscover your hopes and dreams, and find a different way to live.

New year, new decade, new you.