How much of what you drag into each New Year is baggage and bias from the preceding year? Sure, of course, there are pledges to diet and exercise more, get organized (whatever that means), learn something new.
How much of what’s preventing you from moving forward is that stuff which has always been holding you back? Not new stuff by any stretch of the imagination. Just the same old stuff, perhaps repackaged so that you don’t recognize it – for a while.
What if you thought of 2013 as a blank slate? You can fill it with anything you like. You can do the “out with the old” and “in with the new” routine. However, what would you truly get rid of as part of the “out with the old”?
Throwing out your mindset, baggage, and biases is not an easy thing to do.
What is that elephant in your room that’s crowding the doorway so you can’t walk out and go forward? There probably 
is more than one elephant in your room. What are their names? What do they represent? Who might they be?
All of us spend so much time dodging elephants and their flotsam and jetsam that we cripple ourselves in terms of professional development. You know how you do it to yourself: “If only I had finished grad school;” “If only I had closed that big sale and won that award;” “If only I had gotten into a 4-year university’”, “If only I had other career options other than working for my parents;” and on, and on, and on.
There are lots of elephants in our heads.
Elephants also have our permission to tell us that we are “too.” You know: “too dumb,” “too stupid,” “too disorganized,” “too inefficient.” Then there are the elephants which we’ve given permission to tell us that we are “not”: “not good enough,” “not proficient enough,” “not entitled to,” “not destined to,” “not supposed to.”
Throw the elephants out of the room. In fact, for good measure, throw out a lot of the other status quo habits that you’ve been mentally shackled to, as well. Throw out more than you need to throw out.
You are better than that, anyway.
Start 2013 with a blank slate. Inject an entrepreneurial perspective towards your career development. Make it into what you would like, rather than letting those elephants, and baggage and biases, keep reminding you of what could have been.
It still can be if you give yourself permission to move forward.
The less mental junk you are carrying around inside your head will be uplifting. You have so much more mental capacity to think, innovate and create when you aren’t devoting your time to listening to all those voices in your head telling you otherwise.
What does 2013 look like now that you’ve cleared the way for your blank slate? What do your possibilities look like when you don’t keep second-guessing yourself and imposing other people’s opinions onto your own professional goals?
Get those elephants out of your room. Trash the baggage and biases which have always gotten in your way.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented or fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us, it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” ~Nelson Mandela, 1984
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