It's February, and we are now well and truly into 2024.

Can you remember all the resolutions you made over Christmas? All your aspirations for the year ahead? All your ambition, career goals, your objectives that you wanted to achieve? Are you still proceeding confidently on the course you set?

Or have your aspirations fallen on the first hurdle as the realism of daily pressures and stress reasserted themselves as soon as you returned to work in early January?

I am not trying to shame any of you, and I am certainly not saying that you should feel guilty. We have all been there. I certainly have. But it is worth remembering 1 thing.

Those aspirations we dreamed of during the 10 days away from work over Christmas is probably an accurate reflection of what we actually want and would like to work towards, which become lost as soon as we go back to work.

Unfortunately, it is a lot of easier to be brave when there is no one around to whom we have to be brave to, than it is when we receive the January credit card bill. My advice to you (and I apologise as I really do not want to sound like I am preaching), is this:

Go for it!

The most difficult thing is being brave enough to make a change.

I am not going to say anything quite as silly as give the security of dependable income to follow your dream to become a Hollywood actor. Clue, if you haven't secured your Hollywood walk of fame by the time you're 40, then you will probably never will. I am sorry to have dispelled that dream, but someone had to.

No, what I am saying is something else.

Dare to change. Dare to embrace the challenge.

Challenge is good. It keeps you aspiring to succeed, it leads to success. The goals we set ourselves provides the goals provides focus, competition gives us that inner drive to win.

Even if you are currently leading the way, achieving your short-term goals, think about 1 possible outcome. Where will this success leave me?

I bet you all this; without a challenge, you won't stay at the top for long.

Look at Formula 1. I appreciate that it is not everyone's favourite sport, but my German ancestry loves the statistics, the competition and the technology, so I hope you will indulge me in this.

Sebastian Vettel won the world championship consecutively 4 times from 2010 to 2013. He and his team (Red Bull) were so dominant, that he effectively had no other rivals (don't worry, I still supported Lewis Hamilton during those years...). By 2014, his rivals had finally caught up with Red Bull, and he never won the championship again and he never quite recovered the drive (get it...) and ambition which he showed at the start of his career.

This is interesting for 2 reasons.

Firstly, it demonstrates what happens when you have little competition. This isn't too belittle your achievements, but the danger is when you are in a sterile environment, you lose that competitive edge, that ambition that is going to get you where you want to be.

Secondly, realising that his career had plateaued, Vettel left Red Bull for Ferrari which, at the time was giving a milk float a run for its money in being the world's slowest vehicle. But it was this challenge which appealed to Vettel; could he take a weaker team, transform it and lead to a world championship?

He failed, but he embarked on the challenge nonetheless.

Vettle retired in 2022 at the age of 35.

Compare him to Hamilton, who has run 7 world championships and is still racing at the age of 37.

Hamilton won all 7 of his championships in the face of strong competition. This kept him alert, competitive, hungry for victory, a stark contrast to Vettel.

It shall be interesting to see what happens to Max Verstappen, whose 3 world championships have been just as dominant as Vettel's. Will he keep his ambition, or will he too look for other challenges? Verstappen has always spoken about his interests outside of Formula 1, so he might leave it altogether.

As an aside, Michael Schumacher retained his desire to succeed throughout a dominant career, winning 7 championships with little competition towards the end of his career. For that reason, I would argue that he is the greatest of all time, but that is probably my German genes saying that...

Back to us.

Let us consider what the likes of Vettel, Verstappen and Hamiliton can teach us.

They demonstrate the need to reinvigorate, the need to have others pushing us to achieve our objectives. Every world record that exists has been set by someone who has pushed the boundaries, who have left their competitors behind. Speak to any athlete or sportsman, and they will all say that it is their opponents who have pushed them.

Why does this matter for us?

Because in careers which will span 30 plus years, it is inevitable that we will all experience a plateau, a rut which we will need to break out of in order to achieve our life's ambitions.

We should be clear, I am not referring to your colleagues.

I am at all not advocating turning every office environment into a turbo-charged Glengarry Glen Ross-style US machismo expletive nightmare, in which you and your colleagues have to back stab each other to secure that month's top performance and that month's losers are sacked.

Team work is vital and always remember that your colleagues are (primarily) on your side. (Remember the chant "for the strength of the pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack" from The Jungle Book?). They are not your competitors.

So, if were to go back to the Formula 1 analogy, let us imagine that the cars are our careers (it is not competition we need to be too concerned about but rather than the performance).

Are our careers performing as well as we want, or do we need to take a risk in order to get it back on track? Our aspirations will help answer this question for us.

I remember a conversation my late father once had with a friend of his (called Derek) when I was a teenager. The friend (who at that time would have been in his mid to late forties) was a successful civil engineering executive, but was not exactly special. He provided a very comfortable but not flashy life for his wife and 2 children.

Almost overnight, he had brought 2 new cars, a 6 bedroom mansion in Cobham (one of the wealthiest postcodes in the UK) as a stop gap as he built his dream house about a mile down the road.

My father asked him what had changed, joking that Derek must have won the lottery. The answer, which was totally unexpected to anybody who knows this middle of the road Andre Agassi lookalike, was as follows.

Realising that he was in a bit of rut, Derek left his safe 9 to 5 job to start a new venture within engineering with some acquaintances. He didn't tell anyone except family. This venture took off, in a big way and was brought out after a couple of years. Afterwards which Derek retained some minority shares and a place on the board of the larger company.

He told my father "I took the risk, and now I'm going to enjoy my life." What was the risk? His new venture would have collapsed, with no income to support his family.

As it turned out, Derek did, sort of, win the lottery. As my father joked.

Derek dared, and Derek won.

Opportunities like this do not always come off, and they do not always appeal to everyone. The reality is that deep down, Derek obviously has a much bigger entrepreneurial spirit to him than is immediately obvious.

As I said at the start of this blog, I am not advocating that we all leave our jobs en masse.

But ask yourselves instead, what challenge and perhaps risk does my career require to realise my aspirations?

If it doesn't, then fantastic. I am genuinely happy for you.

But for many of us, our careers may require a fresh impetus, or a lateral move, or even a brief conversation with someone to say, this is what you have done, this is the strength of what you are doing, but what can you do in the future? Essentially, audit our career and present us with a business case of where we are and where we can go from here.

Is there something that you have not yet identified which can make you find your inner-Derek?

As the cliché says, identifying this need is the first stage in dealing with it. In my opinion, it is actually the most difficult, because you need to have the courage to say to yourself that you need to make a change, and the bravery to admit this to your family.

The courage is fighting through that doubt, that reminds your responsibilities, that disproportionately portrays risk as a destroyer.

You will not be going as far as Derek; you are not putting your livelihood and family's future wellbeing at risk. That would be reckless.

And the term "challenge" does not need to have negative connotations. It comes in many forms, from seeking a new opportunity, to retraining yourself parttime, to answering that speculative message from a recruiter, to making a lateral move, to reevaluating your aspirations and where you see your life going in 5, 10, even 15 years from now.

It is not about chasing your dream. In my experience, dreams have a somewhat disappointing habit of forever remaining dreams.

It is about seizing that opportunity, to providing fresh incentives into your professional life.

You will be amazed at how you can relieve stress, concern and worry by the enjoyment of seeking success through a fresh opportunity. Unfortunately, these negativities breed and are encouraged when we are least professionally fulfilled.

But you would be taking the risk to a accept the challenge of a new role, a new environment, a new aspiration, a fresh impetus that you may not have felt for a number of years. This is 1 of the many secrets to success; to identify when we have plateaued and to accept a readiness to do something about it.

So, for the remainder of 2024, let's grab the initiative, let us find again our thoughts and decisions made over Christmas.

Do not be afraid, embrace the challenge. Relieve the stress of work by finding that new opportunity.

Dare to do differently.

Dare to take that risk.

Dare to succeed.