The Moment Between Years: One Quiet Hour to Tell Yourself the Truth
By Mitchell Schuckman, PCC | Founder, The Schuckman Group
There is a short stretch of time every year that most leaders don’t plan for, but almost all of them feel. It lives between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when the calendar loosens, the pace finally slows, and the constant pressure to respond, decide, and produce eases just enough to let quieter thoughts surface.
For people who spend most of their lives in motion, that pause can feel unfamiliar. And sometimes, a little unsettling.
I’m writing this after a conversation I had earlier this week with a leader I’ll call Mark, someone I first met just after the start of this year. The timing of that conversation, and what he was wrestling with, felt too important to ignore.
When We First Met, He Was Focused on Resolutions
Mark works at a large global consulting firm. He’s a senior leader, well into his career, trusted by clients, respected internally, and carrying the kind of responsibility that doesn’t fully shut off at night or on weekends. When we first met in early January of this year, he reached out because he wanted help staying accountable to the resolutions he had set for himself.
He came prepared. Very prepared. He actually came to me with a personal project plan.
He wanted to get back into shape and committed to exercising four times a week. He planned to clean up his diet, cut back on sugar and late-night eating, and lose weight he had put on over the past few years. He wanted to meditate regularly, even if it was only ten minutes a day, to strengthen his mind and find added clarity. Professionally, he wanted to be more intentional about his presence, speak up more in senior meetings, and position himself for a broader leadership role that felt like a natural next step.
He was clear about his intention. This wasn’t casual. He had made resolutions before. This year, he was intently focused on keeping them and he wanted me to be by his side, keeping him accountable.
A Year of Real Follow-Through
And to his credit, he kept them all.
Over the course of the year, Mark followed through on most everything he had committed to. He exercised consistently. He lost weight. He felt better physically than he had in a long time. His mindfulness practice wasn’t perfect, but it existed, which was more than he could say in prior years. At work, he was more deliberate about how he showed up. He raised his hand more often. He spoke with greater confidence. He didn’t disappear into execution the way he sometimes had in the past.
People noticed. Opportunities began to shift in his direction.
If you were scoring the year objectively, it was a good one. Significant progress. No major missteps. The kind of year that looks successful from the outside and would easily pass any year-end review.
Which is why his call to me this week stood out.
The Call That Prompted This Article
Mark reached out a few days ago, during this quiet stretch between Christmas and New Year’s. He wasn’t calling to set new resolutions or ask for help refining his goals. He wanted to talk about something else.
“I did almost everything I said I was going to do this year,” he told me. “But I don’t feel the way I thought I would.”
He described Christmas morning. No emails. No calls. No meetings. Just a quiet house, a cup of coffee, and time to think. As he looked back on the year, what surprised him was not disappointment, but a sense of flatness he hadn’t expected. The satisfaction he assumed would come with all that discipline and follow-through never quite arrived.
“I thought I’d feel more settled,” he said. “More at peace with myself.”
Instead, what he felt was restlessness. A low-level sense that something important was still unresolved, even though nothing obvious was wrong. From the outside, things were going well. On the inside, he felt less grounded than he expected to feel at this point in his career, and especially after a year like the one he was wrapping up.
That disconnect is more common than most leaders admit.
What He Was Really Hoping to Fix
As we talked, it became clear that Mark hadn’t set those resolutions simply to improve habits. He had been hoping they would fix something deeper. He wanted the noise in his head to quiet down. He wanted to feel less pulled in every direction. He wanted a sense of alignment between the life he was living and the effort he was putting in.
The resolutions themselves were thoughtful and healthy. The assumption underneath them was the problem. He had believed, quietly and reasonably, that achievement would eventually create fulfillment.
It rarely works that way.
What surprised Mark most in that conversation wasn’t a breakthrough insight or a new way of thinking about goals. It was the experience of slowing down and staying with the realization instead of immediately trying to solve it. There was no rush to define the next set of objectives. No pressure to optimize or reframe the year as a stepping stone to something else. We spent time naming what the year had given him, and what it hadn’t, without treating that gap as a failure or a flaw.
That space changed the tone of the conversation. It allowed something more honest to begin reaching the surface.
Why This Week Matters More Than Most
There are plenty of articles right now about resolutions, habits, and small improvements. Most of them are well intentioned. Very few of them ask leaders to pause long enough to question the assumptions behind their goals.
The days between Christmas and New Year’s are different. Expectations soften. The noise drops. The calendar is about to turn whether you are ready or not. In that brief window, it becomes harder to outrun the questions you’ve been postponing because the usual distractions aren’t there to protect you.
This is why I believe this moment matters so much. Not because it’s time to plan harder, but because it’s time to listen more honestly. Most leaders already have enough discipline, ambition, and capability. What they don’t always have is space to slow down and put language to what they are actually experiencing.
One useful place to start in that quiet hour is not with milestones or goals, but with words. Simple ones. How does your work feel right now? Energizing, draining, heavy, flat, satisfying, anxious, meaningful, scattered? And just as important, how do you wish it felt a year from now? Calmer, clearer, more purposeful, lighter, more grounded, more aligned?
Those adjectives often tell you more than any list of accomplishments ever will.
A Different Way to Approach the New Year
For Mark, the shift wasn’t dramatic. He certainly doesn’t plan to abandon his goals or reinvent his career. What changed was the quality of his thinking. Once he stopped focusing on what he wanted to do next and started paying attention to how he wanted to feel in his work and his life, different priorities began to surface. That’s where our coaching work together in the new year will begin.
That distinction matters. Tasks and milestones are useful, but they tend to keep people operating at the surface. Feelings, the ones you have now and the ones you want to have, point toward something deeper. They reveal what is missing, what is misaligned, and what might need to change beneath the goals themselves.
The clarity Mark began to experience came not from setting better resolutions, but from naming what he wanted more of and what he was tired of carrying. That kind of clarity doesn’t come from rushing past discomfort. It comes from staying with it long enough to understand what it’s asking of you.
Coaching builds from that place. It takes those early, sometimes vague emotional signals and turns them into something usable, helping leaders translate feeling into intention, and intention into meaningful change over time.
The Invitation Between Years
If you’re reading this in the quiet days at the end of the year, perhaps it’s early in the morning, before anyone else is awake, I’d encourage you to resist the urge to jump straight into planning mode. Instead, give yourself one quiet hour. Not to outline goals or map out tasks, but to pay attention to how this past year actually felt, and to name how you want the next one to feel instead.
That moment isn’t something to fix or rush past. It’s information. And for many leaders, it’s the beginning of a more honest conversation with themselves, one that doesn’t usually fit into the normal rhythms of work or life. It’s also often the moment when people realize they don’t want to think these things through on their own.
New years don’t begin with resolutions. They begin with clarity. And clarity almost always starts with the courage to tell yourself the truth, even when it complicates the story you’ve been telling yourself about your success.
If you find yourself wanting help staying with that clarity, turning it into something real and sustainable rather than another short-lived intention, that’s the work I do. I help leaders slow down, give language to what matters most, and build on those early insights in a way that leads to meaningful, even transformational change.
That moment between years is easy to miss. It’s also one of the most valuable opportunities a leader can claim.