Podcast

Episode 578: Overcoming New Year Delay

This year I didn’t get the ‘fresh start’ to the year that I’d hoped for. In case you didn’t either, I’m sharing a concept called New Year Delay and how to overcome a bad start to the new year. Whether your New Year Delay lasts a week, a month or a whole quarter – this episode will stop you feeling shit about it and will teach you what to focus on (and how to think) so that you can end up exactly where you want to be regardless of the way the year started.

If you’re a perfectionist and you’re building a business, you want to listen to this episode today.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Introduction
Hi and welcome to another episode of The Perfectionism Project. A podcast full of perfectionism advice for entrepreneurs. My name is Sam Laura Brown, I help entrepreneurs release their perfectionism handbrake, so they can get out of their own way and build a fulfilling and profitable business. I’m the founder of the Perfectionists Getting Shit Done group coaching program, which is otherwise known as PGSD. And for even more perfectionism advice to help you with your business, you can follow me on Instagram @perfectionismproject.

Sam Laura Brown
Hello, so this is a bit of a different episode to what I had planned to record. You can probably tell by my voice that I’m not well at the moment, I am getting better finally. But this is what I wanna record the episode about, not me telling you all about me being sick because that’s boring, but me telling you about a concept which I’m calling New Year Delay, which you might be experiencing yourself.

So I just wanna talk to you about how I’m thinking about this so that me being sick, really sick across the first week of the new year, why that isn’t going to be impacting my year because we perfectionists can get really fixated on that first week of the new year, wanting to have a fresh start, wanting to have everything go smoothly. And when it doesn’t happen that way, we can get a bit entitled, and for that entitlement, we just get frustrated, deterred, disheartened, and end up not doing the things we wanna be doing. So what I had planned to do today was to record an episode for you that was going to be on my reflection on 2025 and what my plans are for 2026.

I’m gonna be sharing, and I will still do an episode on this, but I’m gonna be sharing my mindset snapshot for 2025 and my mindset forecast for 2026. So if you haven’t listened to episode 571 and 572, those episodes teach you what that is and how those are ways that you can approach reflecting on the year and really setting yourself up for success with the next year, and in a way that’s really different to how I’ve really ever seen it taught before. So I’ve been getting so much feedback, particularly from our PGSDers, about those episodes, and then I taught those concepts in depth, in detail inside the program.

At the end of the year, we did a workshop together, two workshops together on those topics, and we’ve been doing coaching a lot in PGSD. It’s been amazing. Go check out those episodes just to shout out to them.

But in this episode, just because it is top of mind for me right now, I wanted to do this episode on New Year delay and how to overcome it. I just say things funny currently because of my voice not working. It’s finally starting to work better, believe it or not.

This is it working better, of how to overcome New Year delay. So I’m just gonna be talking from top of mind just all the things I’ve been thinking about with this and just sharing a bit of my story as well, the context for this. So as I teach, I like to practice what I preach.

You wanna practice what I teach? That I teach a lot about clean rest, which is this concept of getting rest for your brain, getting rest where you’re not feeling guilty, you’re not feeling behind, you’re not feeling bad, you’re not shooting yourself, you’re not shaming yourself. You have clean rest, which is rest that is like clean or free of all of that emotional baggage. So you might still be active in your clean rest.

Like for me, in a lot of my clean rest, I’m looking after my four children. But in my brain, I’m not feeling guilty that I’m not working on my business. That’s what makes it clean rest.

So I teach this concept of clean rest. I’ve been practicing it now for at least 10 years and teaching it not for quite as long, but a very long time, many, many years. And so as part of that, I have regular clean rest each week and I also take weeks off throughout the year.

So I’m actually planning in 2026, I think I have eight weeks scheduled off throughout the year, maybe nine. And then what I did was I had planned to have off the Christmas week and the New Year week or like that period so that my first day back would be yesterday, which was Tuesday, the 6th of January. And I think my last work day, it was almost three weeks because I only work a three-day work week.

So I think my last work day was the 18th of December, the Thursday. And so I just had imagined what a glorious time that time was going to be. I really, especially I just feel like I was just feeling ready for a break and to just kind of have time to not think about the business, just clear my head, re-energize, be reconnected to the higher level mission and the things that I care about and just have time not being in the weeds of the business.

And also we have, obviously, in that time, Christmas, we celebrate Christmas through Christmas. We do a Christmas Eve Eve party on the 23rd every year. So doing that and then making Christmas magical for the kids, it was Liam’s first Christmas this Christmas, seeing family, seeing friends, but I’d also planned within that time, I was going to have four days that I was going to be able to kind of just like pot around and do what I wanted because the kids would be at daycare.

I might have Liam with me, but he is pretty chill. He’s seven months old. So he still requires, obviously, attention and love, but he can just kind of like come along with me on my things relatively easily.

So I’d planned that there’d be at least these four days. We were missing a few daycare days due to public holidays and things like that. But then what happened is that Lydia, my daughter, got sick with a virus and then Liam also got sick.

We found out it was two different viruses. And then everyone else in our family got sick with the virus that Lydia had. And so there was about a week of the kids being sick, but Steve, my husband, and myself being okay.

And then as they started to get better, we had to cancel plans across Christmas, which was a shame to do that. And we just had a lot of quiet time and TV time together and stuff like that as everyone was recovering. And then I got sick and I got the virus.

And so I already had it, but it started getting really bad. And yesterday was my seventh day in a row of having fevers and just a really bad cough and having to have a lot of sleep and naps at this time. And I’m not a napper for this time.

So I’m like, okay, I need to go and lie down because I am currently not able to function and I know I need to rest. Like I also have really over the years gotten so much better at asking for help, taking care of myself, going for a nap, going to rest. I think previously I would have just pushed through and not have had any naps or rest, but there were quite a few times, like multiple times, I think basically on the 1st of Jan, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, the New Year’s Eve as well, I was just like, I need to go and lie down and like figure it out how I could make it possible that I could go and get a nap that I needed instead of just trying to like push through or do it all by myself and things like that.

So that was really good to just see like, oh yeah, I am taking better care of myself and getting rest. But my vision, like I just, I love, as most perfectionists do, like the New Year, having that New Year energy, I was like, we’re gonna have a week of like Christmas and just kind of like, then we can putter around and then it’s going to be a week of like, I can do some kind of like New Year planning, I can do, and like fully wrap up my mindset snapshot and forecast and planning and work through a planning exercise from my coach for the year and just like do some big picture thinking about things. Like I just love doing that at that time of year and I didn’t get to do it at all and I didn’t care to do it at all and I just had no desire.

I was like, I just am really in survival mode and just trying to be okay. I think on, I started getting sick on, it must have been New Year’s Eve and that was the day I had to go pick up Lydia, one of the days I had to go pick up Lydia from daycare as she needed to come back home and then we went to Bunnings and I was like, I wanna get a new plant for my office and I looked at the plants, I was like, I don’t even care, I don’t care. I don’t, I wanna buy this plant, I don’t actually wanna buy it, I can’t be bothered.

I can’t be bothered taking it home and potting it or like having it sit around and not getting potted, like I can’t be bothered and when, I feel like when I’m like that about an indoor plant, something’s wrong because I love them but anyway and then I slept that afternoon and then the next day I slept from like 9 a.m. till 2 p.m. which is probably like the longest block of sleep I have had in quite a long time given I have a baby that feeds multiple times overnight. So I just didn’t have the start to the new year that I had planned and I kept being like, okay, today I’m gonna get better and then I wouldn’t and like today I’m gonna get better and then on Monday, today’s Wednesday, on Monday I started antibiotics. I have turned a corner and I am really glad for that.

I am really glad and today I’ve been doing some, like the planning stuff I’ve wanted to be doing yesterday I worked but I was really just like catching up on everything inside the PGSD forum, replying to clients, connecting back in with the business, like just those kinds of things and then I had a fever in the afternoon so I just took care of myself before getting the kids but then today I’ve been doing the planning but like, if you’re a perfectionist, that like you wanna do that planning, like you want the 1st of January to be the day that you are getting the ball rolling and even though it’s still like only one week into January, it can just feel like, and I’ve seen it happen so many times, we can get into this with this perfectionist all or nothing mindset, one way that it can manifest is this flavor of like, if I don’t have the perfect start to something then it’s not worth doing or it’s like, it’s not, we have this kind of idea of like, the start is the best that something will ever be and I think oftentimes this is because if you think about like a perfectionist with a fitness habit, typically or like a perfectionist who’s wanting to go on a diet, typically the first one to three weeks are the best time on that diet and then they fall off because of the perfectionist all or nothing thinking and other things going on as well, highly related to perfectionism, it really impacts perfectionism.

This is one of the main things we support within PGSD, perfectionism really makes such an impact with being able to stick to something and actually improve it. When we’re in that perfectionist mindset and thinking in the perfectionist way, it feels so vulnerable to keep trying at something that isn’t going perfectly and so we quit, we change plans completely, we get busy with other things because it feels so uncomfortable to be in that messy middle, we like do anything we can to try and get out of that discomfort of putting in a full effort and that effort not paying off, which of course like, if you’re on a diet for three weeks, you’re not gonna be rapidly losing weight yet, like you need to actually, whatever you’re doing, hopefully it’s something sustainable, be doing that for an extended period of time, the same with business, just because you’re like, okay, I feel so inspired, I’m gonna be posting on Instagram or posting on TikTok or posting on YouTube or whatever, like it is going to take a significant number of repetitions.

A significant amount of time to be able to get it to where you wanna be and also partly that’s because you’re needing to develop skill sets and emotional capacities and the mindset along the way and so we can just be in this mindset as perfectionists, like one of the manifestations of the all-or-nothing mindset and how it comes up is this idea that like, if something doesn’t start the way we want, it can’t end the way that we want it to end and that is kind of like a lost cause and this kind of thought as well is the kind of thought that will have you if you’re for example, like trying to do time blocking and you are doing that on your calendar which is different to power planning but if you’re time blocking and doing that on your calendar and then you’re like, you’ve got these crazy plans on your calendar.

You’re trying your best to be motivated and disciplined and like you’ve got so much work to do because you’re trying to catch up on all the past procrastination and like how behind you are and all of that and then you fall off and it’s Wednesday for example and if you then wait till Monday or the first of a month or the first of a year, that is that all-or-nothing mindset and this idea of like, if something doesn’t start or continue to go as planned, then it can’t finish where I want it to finish and so how I think about the week, the month, the year, creating results is that the start of it isn’t that important and I don’t mean that in, I don’t know, the start of it can be special, it can be magical, it can be exciting, like it can be lots of things but it’s not a big deal, it’s just a small deal, how it starts out is a small deal.

So for example, for me, did I wanna spend the first of January or the 31st of December getting to do some journaling, getting to do some reflection, getting to be in the new year energy so that by the time I came back to working that I was healthy and actually able to focus properly and like excited to be doing my working and getting back into it rather than just feeling like, again, I’m excited to be working and I really enjoy doing it but like my energy obviously isn’t where it normally is, I’m not able to speak as much as I’m normally able to speak and that’s part of my job is speaking as a coach, that’s part of what I do and so did I want it to look different? Yes, is it a big deal? No and really being able to take that approach and just seeing it as like if it doesn’t start the way I want, it’s just a small deal because I’ll give you some other examples as well that might be helpful just so we can see that might be helpful just so you can see yourself in any of these, potentially. But say like that for social media, for example, if you’re like, okay, I’m going to start doing YouTube vlogs and I’m going to do one vlog every week or like one about PGSDers. She’s doing the Creative Cocoon course inside PGSD and she’s doing it about, I’m doing a daily video where she’s sharing a book that she loves.

She’s sharing like one of the principles from that book, like one principle per day as a YouTube video. And so we can really, especially this is, I think this like perfectionist entitlement we can have, when we think an idea is so damn good, we feel entitled to that idea instantly working. And this kind of thought pattern is so problematic.

I won’t go down the rabbit hole of, of it all, but this is the same thought pattern that will have you think a bad idea can’t work. So there’s no point trying. So for example, unless you have the perfect niche or the perfect product for the perfect niche, there’s no point even offering it.

Just go back and do more research. Like that is that thought pattern of this entitlement to like good ideas, especially if you’re someone, I talk to so many people like this, and this is who we help in PGSD. If you are someone, if you have just been stuck on like, I need to find the perfect business name.

I need to figure out the perfect content plan, the perfect niche, the perfect product, the perfect anything podcast name, the perfect podcast setup, YouTube setup, whatever it is. It’s this entitlement to like, if I have, if I do everything right, everything will work. And if I do anything wrong, then nothing will work is how we think about it as perfectionists.

And so we really want to actually start to see it for how it really is, which is that bad ideas evolve into good ones. Often good ideas, when they are met with execution, sometimes often don’t get the results that we want or they don’t work immediately. So for example, for that PGSDer, doing those videos, I wouldn’t want her to have the expectation that, Oh my God, I’m so excited about this idea.

I love this idea. And so then I need to start doing it. And I should be getting lots of views.

And even oftentimes you don’t even like consciously think it, but then if you are disappointed that there aren’t more views, this is going on for you. If you’re like, well, I wouldn’t expect it anyway, because I don’t really have an audience, but if you’re disappointed, that is that sign that there’s like, there was some expectation or entitlement there that you hadn’t named. So we want to look at like the beginning is the worst.

It will be not the best. So you don’t have to have a perfect start. And if you don’t have a perfect start, who cares? We don’t even need to aim for the perfect start.

I know people like, there’s always that saying that people say of like, start before you feel ready. First of all, that requires a certain, and we do this work in PGSD about like increasing your emotional capacity to feel certain feelings because to start before you feel ready is an emotional game that you’re playing to be able to do that. It’s not something you can intellect your way into.

Like it’s not about your intellectual knowledge. If you know what to do, but you’re just not doing it, there’s an emotional problem that’s happening. There’s perfectionism that is causing that emotional problem.

That is meaning that you’re not able to actually do the things you need to do. So we want to look at like anytime you’re starting something. And in this case, I’m talking about when you have new year delay and maybe it’s the first week, maybe it’s the first month, maybe it’s the first quarter of the year.

Maybe it’s even longer than that, but like you might be, someone might be listening to this episode in the future, like edit, like my whole quarter of January, February, and March was so delayed on what I wanted it to be. Like it just, there was like thing after thing after thing. I just like, couldn’t get my feet under me.

Like I just couldn’t get myself going the way I wanted to be like, okay. And it’s just a small deal because how it starts is not an indicator of how it’s going to end. But if we make it such a big deal that we didn’t get the start to something that we wanted to get, that we didn’t get the engagement, for example, that we wanted to get like, this is the other thing too, that if you, this is just such a perfectionist thing.

And I think school really kind of contributes to this mentality as well. But like this idea of being able to be good at something when you’re just starting out at it just makes no sense. But for some reason, like, for example, like if you want to start a podcast and I want it to be good, well, it’s going to be shit in the beginning because you aren’t skilled at podcasting and just starting to see things.

Like I really love thinking in skill sets instead of like, I want it to be good. Like to be good, you need to be skilled. Are you skilled? If not, you need to take action and PGSD perfectionist getting shit done.

We take action towards developing skills, not just knowledge, like intellectual understanding, intellectual understanding, research, doing all of that. That isn’t how you build a business. You need action.

You need emotional capacity to be able to take that action and like keep following through on that and keep being able to do that even when you’re not getting instant results, even when things aren’t instantly working for you as your perfectionist brain hopes that they would be. So you really need to be able to be taking action to develop the skill sets to get skilled. And that is what we want to have you looking at instead of thinking about this perfectionist way that we do is like good and bad, right and wrong.

And of course, as perfectionists, we’re always wrong. We love to be self-righteous in our own heads, I think, but we’re always feeling wrong and we try, like we want to be right to try and counteract all the feelings of wrongness. Like I feel like that’s partly such a universal thing.

I feel like most people to some degree talk about perfectionism as like this kind of like the, I don’t know if sliding scale is the best word, basically there’s like a spectrum of like how much your perfectionism handbrake is on and everyone’s got a perfectionism handbrake. But I think there’s this like, it’s so common for people to feel wrong and to want to be right because they feel so wrong. And I am speaking from experience there as well.

So we want to have you with any new year delay, really look at, are you making it a big deal and to downsize that into it being a small deal and to be focused on going forward and to be focused on how to gain momentum, how to improve, how to grow and just being in this mentality of the start of something is the worst it will be, not the best. And if you have been the person who the best is, the start is the best, it’s the best time you’re on the diet. It’s the best time you’re doing the fitness program.

It’s the best time you’re posting on Instagram. Like if you’re the best at anything in the start and then it dwindles out, it’s because of this mindset. And so you’re the exact person that then needs to shift into, oh, the best is just the starting point.

It gets better. It’s not meant to get worse, though sometimes it can feel rocky along the way when we’re improving things, but it’s going to long-term zoomed out. You are going to be able to improve it.

So for me, for the year has a week and what feels like the most like optimistic week of the year, where it’s just like you haven’t actually really been able to go out and try things yet. So it’s so full of optimism, so full of hope. I was just coaching a PGSDers today on her growth goal, just being such a big goal based on where she is.

And she was saying like it was inspired by a goal that she heard I had set in 2018. I was saying like that goal that I set was too big. This is why we now teach the growth goal the way we do it in PGSD, because it’s so easy to be in this like, well, I intellectually understand how to achieve the goal.

So then that means I can achieve it. So then I need to aim beyond that. Like that intellectual understanding isn’t actually the full recipe.

It’s like if you’re making blueberry muffins, you need blueberries, but you also need the stuff that makes the muffin. And so you need to be able to have not just the intellectual understanding, which let’s say for my analogy was blueberries, you need to have the rest of it. You need to have those other components, the skills, the mindset, the self image, the emotional capacity.

You need to be able to release your perfectionism handbrake so you can actually develop the skills and the emotional capacity and to be able to do all these things that you need to do to be able to consistently follow through. That is a requirement. It’s not a luxury.

It’s not like, oh, that would be nice. It is essential. And so we want to see like your, how you start the year, whether it’s feeling like you had a bad week or a bad month or a bad quarter at the beginning of the year.

And even if it’s like, oh, I was healthy and like nothing was going wrong, but I just kept like procrastinating and procrastinating and procrastinating, for example, then it’s like, okay. And that’s just a small deal. Where do we want to go to from here? Because how it starts isn’t the indicator of how it’s going to end.

And we want to break you out of that cycle of thinking that the beginning of something is the best it will ever be. It’s this like idea, the way we build up, like how things begin, how a business is going to begin, how a first launch of a product is going to be, or a service, or like the first customer, or like the first, like the firsts, basically. When we put the first on a pedestal, we create distance from them.

We make them harder to achieve. We then feel like we need to do more research and more thinking about things and going back to the drawing board and like all of that comfort work that we do because we’re so scared that if we don’t get the perfect start, we’re not going to be able to have the perfect ending. But it’s that obsession with getting the perfect start that actually stops us from being able to create the ending that we want.

So it’s never game over. It’s never too late. And we want to have you know it’s a small deal, not a big deal, and that the beginning is just the beginning.

It’s not the end. So with that said, I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode and if you’re not yet on the PGSD waitlist for my coaching program Perfectionist Getting Shit Done, you want to get yourself on that doors are opening for one week only on the 30th of January 2026. So that is the week that you’re going to be able to join us inside and get the support and the help that you want with getting out of your own way in your business, with being able to show up and be visible and feel safe being visible and to being able to stop procrastinating, to stop overthinking, to stop burning yourself out and to use tools like power planning and clean rest and the growth goal to get your perfectionist mindset working for you instead of against you so that you can get your business off the ground, so that you can get your business to making income, to being able to a lot of our PGSDers are working towards being able to replace the income at their job or being able to make a full-time income from their jobs, from their jobs, from their business.

So I want to invite you inside if you have, especially if you have been going it alone and just constantly you feel bad that at the end of every week you’re like, I feel like I’ve been working all the time and I haven’t made any progress, I haven’t been creating momentum and you feel that you should be further along, that you have the smarts and the intelligence to be more successful in business than you are but you keep getting in your own way, you make plans and you don’t follow through on them, you fall off or you go to the extremes and just burn yourself out trying to execute a plan and that it’s just completely unsustainable and you can’t repeat it again and just like if that is you and if you relate to what I share on this podcast, I really want to invite you inside for our January enrolment.

I’m also going to be doing a five-part podcast series on this podcast so hit the subscribe button wherever you listen so that you get the episodes when they come out but the first episode is going to be coming out on the 22nd of January 2026. There’s five episodes I’ll be sharing a bit a bit, oh my goodness, I’ll be sharing a bit more about what is going to be in that five-part series and how it’s going to help you a bit closer to the time but I just want to let you know that that five-part podcast series, an all-new series that I’m really excited to record is coming and then when that fifth part is released, we will be opening enrolment for Perfectionists Getting Shit Done, welcoming new PGSDers inside and providing the support and just the like the relief of having the support and the tools and the direction and the focus and a way of thinking that really works for your perfectionist brain and helps you to get more done rather than getting more scattered and feeling like you should be being more strategic and being everywhere and doing all the things and working harder working longer and like all of that that is not how we do it in PGSD.

We get shit done in our work time that we choose for our business and then we rest without guilt, very focused on doing your needle movers, we teach you how to identify what the most important things are for you to grow your business based on where it is right now and give you the tools and the support and the coaching to be able to actually execute those and get the results for that and we’ve just had such incredible results from PGSDers doing that process and so if you relate to this podcast, if you’ve been also especially if you’ve been a long-time listener but if you’re a new listener too, it is never too late or too early to join PGSD. I just want to invite you inside, I want to be your coach in the program, get to know you, to support you and to help you get out of your own way, release your perfectionism handbrake and show up fully in your business getting shit done without burning out. So samlaurabrown.com/pgsd is where you can go to find out more about the program and also you want to sign up for the waitlist as well.

You’ll just enter your name and your email and then you’ll be on the waitlist so you are the first to be notified, you’ll find out more about the program and you’ll be able to be ready to join us when doors open on the 30th of January. So with that said, I hope you’re having a beautiful day and I will talk to you in the next episode.

Outro
If you enjoy this podcast, I recommend signing up for the waitlist for my program called perfectionist getting shit done, aka pgsd. This is a program designed to help you get out of your own way in your business, you’re going to learn how to release your perfectionism handbrake by setting a growth goal for your business. Planning properly as a perfectionist with power planning and getting regular, guilt free, clean rest, you’ll learn the skills required to get out of your own way and be supported every step of the way to do it. To find out more about the program and join the waitlist today, go to samlaurabrown.coms/pgsd.

Author: Sam Brown