During the summer, many professionals step away from their routine for a longer period, for the first time in several months. The pace slows down, the calendar empties, and, for a few days, the continuous cycle of meetings, emails and deadlines disappears. Interestingly, it is also during this period that questions arise that would hardly find space during the rest of the year: am I still motivated? Am I still learning? Is my work still aligned with what I value? Am I where I want to be or simply where I have ended up? There is a pattern that repeats itself every year, we return from holiday with the feeling that “this year will be different”. We promise to organise our time better, invest more in our development, balance priorities or, finally, start that project we have been putting off. A few weeks later, many of us return to exactly the same habits, the same decisions and the same routines. The problem with returning to work is rarely the return itself, it is returning to exactly the same way of managing our careers.

For a long time, we associated major professional changes with extraordinary decisions: changing companies, accepting a promotion, taking on a new role or starting a training programme. These decisions continue to be important, but professional change is also built through much less visible choices. Author James Clear (2018), in his work Atomic Habits, popularised precisely the idea that small behavioural changes, when repeated consistently, can produce significant results over time and careers are no exception. Much more than occasional major decisions, it is also the behaviours we repeat every day that determine how we evolve, learn and position ourselves in the market.

The issue is that habits have a particular characteristic: they become automatic. Charles Duhigg (2012) explains how the brain transforms repeated behaviours into routines, reducing the effort required to perform certain actions. It is a fundamental mechanism for efficiency, but it can become an obstacle when it prevents questioning and change. We continue to accept the same tasks, systematically postpone important conversations, leave learning for “when there is time” and respond to the demands of the day without questioning whether they are still aligned with our objectives. Autopilot is efficient for getting things done, but it becomes dangerous when it starts making decisions for us!

This idea finds a parallel in cognitive psychology. Daniel Kahneman (2011) distinguishes between two modes of functioning of the mind: one fast, intuitive and automatic, and another slower, analytical and deliberate. The first allows us to respond effectively to many of the demands of everyday life; the second becomes particularly important when we need to analyse, question and make more complex decisions.

Conscious career management precisely requires the ability to interrupt automaticity and create space for this more deliberate thinking. However, the pressure of day-to-day life means that we spend a large part of our time executing, leaving little room to reflect on the direction we are, effectively, building. This is precisely why September can represent more than simply a return to work, it can be a privileged moment to interrupt patterns that have stopped serving the career we want to build. Not because the calendar has that power, but because returning offers an opportunity to question behaviours that, throughout the year, have become so habitual that we have stopped even noticing them. Perhaps this is the moment to ask different questions, not just “what are my goals?”, but “which habits are, every day, bringing me closer to or taking me further away from those goals?”. Am I still making time to learn? Do I consistently seek feedback? Do I nurture my network? Am I updating my skills? Am I building options or simply doing what is asked of me? Or am I still waiting for the next opportunity to come from someone else?

Douglas Hall (2004), in developing the concept of the protean career, anticipated a reality that is particularly evident today: careers are increasingly less defined exclusively by organisations and more dependent on each professional’s ability to take responsibility for their own journey, adapt and guide their decisions based on their own values. That responsibility is not exercised only through major decisions, it is also exercised through the small choices that, when repeated daily, gradually build or limit future possibilities. This is where returning gains a particularly interesting dimension. Starting again does not necessarily mean changing jobs, roles or organisations, it can mean, changing the way we learn, how we manage our time, how we seek opportunities, how we build relationships or how we invest in our employability. Small behavioural changes may seem insignificant in the short term, but accumulated over months or years, they can significantly alter a professional trajectory.

In the book Be the CEO of Your Career, we defend precisely this idea. Managing a career means alternating between two roles, there are moments when we are executors and others when we need to take on the role of CEO. The executor responds to urgencies, meets objectives and solves problems; the CEO does something different: lifts their head from the day-to-day operation, questions the direction, sets priorities and decides what needs to change. The risk is that we spend too much time in the first role and forget about the second. Perhaps that is one of the opportunities that September offers us: not just returning to operations, but making space to think about strategy again. Because being busy does not necessarily mean we are evolving, just as meeting objectives does not, in itself, mean we are building the career we want. Returning to work can, therefore, be much more than the end of the holidays. It can be an invitation to reflect and a starting point for more conscious career management. A career does not change only when we change companies, roles or when we make an extraordinary decision. It also changes when we alter what we do in seemingly insignificant ways every day.

In the end, perhaps the most important question this September is not “how will I return to work?”, but “who do I want to be when I return?”. Because the true fresh start does not happen when the calendar changes. It happens when we decide to stop automatically repeating the career we built yesterday and start, consciously, building the one we want for tomorrow. Because a career does not change when the calendar changes, it changes when we change what we choose to repeat every day!

Article written for Human Resources Portugal.