You Are Not Finished Yet (Especially If You’re Dreading Work Next Week)

The days between Christmas and New Year’s have a way of telling the truth. When the inbox quiets and the calendar loosens, something else gets loud: the quiet dread of going back to work.

Not because we dislike effort or contribution, but because a part of us knows we’re returning to a pattern we’ve outgrown. Stuck, bored, helpless, overwhelmed, or an unhelpful cocktail of all four.

As humans we often reach inner crossroads long before our calendars admit it. In the winter hush, what we hear isn’t laziness; it’s intuition. A craving, a yearning, a notion of “this is not for me like this anymore.”

Lying in bed or walking muddy/snowy trails, many of us imagine three possible escape routes: change the people, change the job, or change ourselves.

The first two are tempting and often necessary, but famously unreliable. People rarely transform on our timelines. Jobs rarely deliver the identity we hunger for. The third option, changing ourselves, sounds like defeat, but it’s the opposite.

It’s the moment we reclaim authorship. The moment the story stops happening to us and starts happening through us and for us.

That shift is not easy. But it’s an opportunity to align our work life with who we are now, not with a past self who chose this path years ago.

We’re Not as Fixed as We Once Believed

For a long time, the dominant story in psychology was that personality was basically set by early adulthood, famously, “by 30, what you see is what you get.” Neuroscience metaphors about “hard‑wiring” in the adult brain reinforced the idea that after youth, change was marginal at best.​

The newer evidence disagrees.

• A large meta‑analysis of 92 longitudinal studies found systematic personality change across the life course, with people on average becoming more conscientious, more emotionally stable, and more agreeable well into midlife.​

• The American Psychological Association summarized this work bluntly: personality traits continue changing throughout life, sometimes more after age 30 than before.​

• Some long‑term studies suggest that the correlation between who you are at 18 and who you are at 60 is weaker than older theories assumed, meaning some people change quite dramatically.

And our brains? Also not finished.

• Decades of research on adult neuroplasticity show that the mature brain can reorganize its structure and function in response to experience, learning, therapy, stress, meditation, and enriched environments.​

• Reviews emphasize that neuroplasticity persists into older age, supporting the acquisition of new skills and habits and even some recovery after injury.

So: you are not a marble statue. You are a living system.

The feeling of dreading work next week isn’t a verdict; it’s a signal. Something in you is ready for a new way of being.

Life Events Sculpt Us More Than We Admit

We like to imagine that change arrives via tidy five‑step models and quarterly plans. More often, it arrives because life puts us in rooms we never applied for: caregiving a parent, raising a child, navigating illness, migrating, burning out, stepping into leadership we don’t feel ready for.

Research on personality development in emerging and mid‑adulthood shows that major life events and how we interpret them are strongly linked to trait change. Two people can live through similar events and come away altered in opposite directions, depending on whether they experience the transition as meaningful growth, as pure threat, or as random misfortune.

This is close to what leadership theorists call vertical development: growth that changes how we see, not just what we know. It often begins not with skill‑building but with a disruption to the old operating system.

When we actively engage these thresholds, staying awake instead of numbing or blaming, our meaning‑making reorganizes.

We start authoring experience instead of simply enduring it. Old scripts loosen; new capacities appear. Patterns that used to trap us begin to soften and widen.

And story is a place where we always have agency.

Self‑Sabotage Is Often an Outdated Strategy

When we say we’re “stuck,” what is usually stuck is a strategy, a way of surviving that once made sense:

• People‑pleasing to maintain belonging

• Overwork to prove worth

• Hyper analyze to avoid risk

• Avoiding conflict to preserve harmony

• Bracing for disappointment because life delivered it too often

These strategies were intelligent solutions for an earlier version of us. They may have kept us safe in volatile homes, rigid cultures, or punishing workplaces.

But as we evolve, they begin to cost more than they protect.

The good news: patterns are not personality. They are learned responses riding on neural pathways that remain plastic. Studies on habit change and therapy consistently show that with deliberate awareness, emotional processing, and repetition in new directions, both behaviour and underlying brain circuits can shift.

Transformation then becomes less about heroic willpower and more about liberation: understanding what this pattern once did for us, grieving what it has cost, and practicing a different move.

Taking Our Power Back: The Self‑Authored Life

Many adults live primarily in what developmental psychologist Robert Kegan calls the socialized mind, shaped by expectations and invisible scripts from family, culture, workplaces, and earlier versions of ourselves.

We learn what is acceptable, who we must be to belong, which dreams are “reasonable.”

There is another way of organizing our inner life: the self‑authored mind. Here we begin writing our own code. We develop an inner compass strong enough to make decisions from alignment rather than fear. We take the pen back from other people’s expectations and start drawing a life that reflects our actual values.

This is not rebellion. It’s adult responsibility and sustainable self-leadership to begin with.

And it is available at 35, 51, or 74, because personality and brain remain capable of reorganization across the lifespan.​

Making this shift doesn’t require changing jobs or people first. It often begins with changing interpretations:

• Why am I tolerating what drains me?

• What do I know but not yet want to admit?

• Where am I giving away my power (to a boss, a brand, a story about who I must be, a habit)?

• What would a more truthful version of me do next?

  
  

When we re‑author even one script, the world subtly reconfigures. Boundaries become clearer. Conversations become more honest. Our expectations of ourselves soften. Our expectations of others sharpen. People start treating us differently without being told to change.

Because we have changed.

This Is Where Creative Leadership Is Born

When we talk about leadership development, what we really mean is adult development.

• Not just more skills, but more perspective

• Not just better habits, but deeper interior capacity

• Not just coping with complexity, but metabolizing it into wisdom

In a world that feels increasingly brittle, anxious, non‑linear, and incomprehensible, this kind of inner expansion is not a luxury. It is survival equipment.

As we evolve beyond our old lens:

• We become less reactive, more responsive

• We become more imaginative with constraints

• We can hold tension and ambiguity without collapsing into either control or avoidance

• We stop outsourcing our authority to systems that were never designed with our flourishing in mind

• We start living from the inside out

  
  

That is power, but of a quiet, durable kind.

So… If You’re Dreading Work Next Week

It may not be just the job. It may not be just the people. It may not be the industry, the season, or the swollen to‑do list.

It may be that an older part of you is still trying to run a life that belongs to a newer version of you.

And the science is on your side:

• You are not fixed ​

• Your brain is not done ​

• Your patterns are not destiny​

• Your personality is not a prison​

• Your story is not predetermined

  
  

This liminal week, neither quite past nor future, is an invitation. Not to burn everything down. Not to force a dramatic, instagrammable leap.

But to get very curious about the path your life wants to take now.

Change is possible and it's natural. Change is happening anyway.

The extraordinary thing is that when we choose to participate in it, when we take our power back and start authoring instead of reacting, the whole landscape of our work and life begins to shift.

And that is very, very good news.

An invitation

If this lands close to home, if you’re lying awake feeling the mismatch between the life you’ve built and the person you’re becoming, you don’t have to untangle it alone.

This is the kind of work done every day with leaders and creatives who want more aligned, spacious, and joyful lives:

• mapping the old scripts,

• understanding the (conflicting) loyalties underneath them,

• and designing experiments that let a truer self take the lead

  
  

If you’d like a confidential, nuanced space to explore what wants to change in you and around you, reach out.

Coaching can’t choose your path for you, but it can help you hear yourself clearly enough to choose on purpose, and to make work feel less like dread, and more like a life you recognize as your own.

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Hi, I’m Monika, Strengths Coach and facilitator. I help individuals and groups cultivate resilience, emotional intelligence, and well-being through strengths-based coaching. Passionate about transformative and creative leadership, I empower leaders to drive meaningful change within themselves, their organizations, and beyond.

I hope you’ll visit often, and I look forward to connecting and working together!