New Year Resolutions

For many of us, the New Year is a chance to not only reset and reflect on the year that passed, but also to set goals, create milestones, and plan for growth over the next 365 days. Considering the eventful, tumultuous, exhausting (and sometimes confusing) last couple of years, mental health, self-care, and work-life balance has shot-up the resolution lists for a lot of us. As for organizations and employers, taking care of their employees and ensuring a healthy and safe work environment will continue to be the priority for the year to come.

For Career Edge, welcoming the year of 2022 meant continuing our mission of creating meaningful, valuable, transforming, life-changing internship opportunities that empower individuals and launch careers that matter. As an organization, this is what we’re committing to for the year to come:

• Discover and develop creative projects that will enable us to support more people with their career launch.
• Be sure we are always supporting and going above and beyond for our staff – both personally and professionally. Continue to be an organization that inspires collaborative ideas between teams and fosters a safe work environment. Keep striving to do the right thing!
• Re-commit to our Host Employer Partners that we are the organization that helps them identify, attract, develop, and retain their workforce of the future.

Career Edge’s very own staff are also sharing their own New Year’s resolutions and goals for 2022.

“Professionally, my resolution is to improve my coding skills by spending more time practicing. My personal resolution is to do more Yoga and meditate more to continue supporting and strengthening my physical and mental health.”

“A few years ago, I made a resolution not to have any more New Year’s resolutions unless the idea actually came to me on New Year’s day! My mindset has evolved to execution over procrastination, as in the past, I found myself waiting for the new year to do things that could have been accomplished well before.

I now believe in setting goals or “resolutions” and working on them immediately. Not exactly rushing to get it done, but more like trying to shrink the time it takes to go from ‘idea’ to ‘goal’ to ‘application’. I’ve realized there is no magic to a New Year or even “starting next week”. Instead, I found that it’s more about making disciplined decisions and forming new habits just by starting regardless of the day of the week or time of the year. I don’t always get it right, but this is the new baseline I am working from.”

“My personal New Year’s resolution is to focus on my health and fitness, and better plan my expenses and savings. Professionally, I would love to continue to help launch more careers and change the lives of people through the work I do.”

“My personal resolution is to really work my selling and retail skills, using all available free platforms to sell merchandise and make more money.”

“This year, I want to focus on one professional development area and grow my skills there, as well as read more. Also, I aim to focus on my health. As a Talent Specialist, it can be a little hard to shut off from work mode – especially when receiving requests for interviews and candidate screening at all hours of the day. However, I know that rest time is vital. So, as my most important resolution of all, I want to stop feeling guilty for taking any time off.”

“Resolutions? I used to believe in New Year resolutions but not anymore. Why? Well, over the last few years, I have learned that each day provides a new opportunity to be better. So, I have incorporated these simple practices that can help me improve daily: 1. Develop daily routine; 2. Ask questions; 3. Enjoy the outdoors and exercise more as it helps me feel less anxious and stressed, especially in these challenging times, 4. Read more to empathize more; and 5. Communicate better. This! It helps to improve relationships and empathy.”

“Both personally and professionally, my resolution is to read more! I don’t spend enough time getting lost in a good book or learning about a topic that would help me be better in my career.”

“Over the years, I discovered that New Year’s resolutions have actually done me more harm than good. I’ve put January 1^st on this pedestal that would magically transform my life and mindset overnight. Instead, what I got was just intense pressure to get things right from the get-go, piles of disappointment, and a sense of failure sprinkled on top as an added bonus. I found that if I didn’t work on my resolutions right from the beginning, I would give up and discount the whole year because “well, the first week of January is over, I’ll just do it in the next new year.”

Now though, I’ve shed my New Year’s expectations and choose to see that everyday is a good day to start something new. I’m living in the freedom of knowing that I can start a new goal at any time, any day of the week, and any month. With this new perspective, I’ve been more committed to my goals, celebrating more milestones, and growing more. Most importantly, my mental health is having a much better time.”