131. The September Reset: One Overdue Decision to Make Before the Year Gets Away From You

Holly Toscanini: I just want to ask you something, and I want you to actually sit with the question and not try to answer it too quickly. What decision did you think you should have made by now? I mean, maybe not this year specifically, just by now, by this point in your life. There's something, isn't there? Something you thought you should have figured out by now, a direction you should have committed to, or a conversation you probably should have had. Maybe it's a career decision you've been thinking about for the last two years or a relationship you've really needed to address for a lot longer than that. Whatever it is, you know what it is. And you've always known. And that's the particular weight of it. It's not a mystery you haven't solved. It's a decision you haven't made yet. And here's what I've noticed about this time of the year. Something about September makes that weight even heavier. And not in a bad way. More like the quiet recognition that the year is moving and the thing you were gonna do this year has still hasn't been done. And if you don't do something about it now, you're gonna spend another four months watching it get get pushed out into next year's list of resolutions. And that's what today is about. Not necessarily a fresh start. And not reinventing your life before autumn gets here. Just one overdue decision that you've identified, examined, and taken action on. Sure, you can use September to start over. It's a great time of year for that, but instead, wouldn't it be exciting if you used it to stop postponing the one thing that already matters? Welcome back to How to Lose the Weight. I'm Holly Toscanini, and I've Always loved September. There's something about it that feels like a genuine reset in a way that January just doesn't. January gets here in the emotional aftermath of the holidays. You're tired, the days are short, and the pressure to transform yourselves comes with a forced enthusiasm that fades by the third week. September is different. It has a natural gravity to it. The rhythm of the year shifts. And if you haven't been in school for 20 or 30 years, something in your body still recognizes this time of year as a threshold. I'm not going to suggest you use this season to reinvent your entire life, but what I am going to suggest is that you use September to identify one decision you've been postponing and get honest about whether the postponement has been preparation or avoidance. Those two things look almost identical from the outside. And today We're going to learn to tell them apart. Let me start by explaining why September is useful for this conversation specifically, because I don't want to just give a nod to seasonal energy without giving you something concrete. There's a particular kind of clarity that comes from this natural transition point. Not because the universe is arranging things differently, but because the transition gives you a vantage point. See, hindsight gives us a lot more clarity than we have when we're in the middle of things. And you can look ahead with a slightly better sense of how much of the year is actually left. August, it feels sort of like a blur. The days feel long, the pace is off, the structure's sort of loose, and a lot of things that should have been decided stay in a kind of holding pattern because it never quite feels like it's the right time. And then September gets here and the holding pattern suddenly becomes visible. You can see just how long you've been circling something much more clearly than you could in June or July. You can count the months. You can fill the gap between where you thought you'd be by now and where you actually are. But I don't want you to be too hard on yourself because that gap holds some information. It tells you that you've been putting something off and that postponement has had a cost. The cost is usually a little quieter than people expect. It's not dramatic. It's that low level. Or feeling of unease because there's still something you haven't addressed yet. The way a particular subject makes you feel slightly tense whenever it comes up, or the feeling it's postponed decision asking for your attention. That's what it is. And September is useful not because it has some magical properties, but because it makes that feeling even stronger. Now the transition of seasons creates enough contrast for you to really feel it too. Here's the other thing September does. It makes the year finite in a way that June just doesn't. In June, you've got plenty of time. There's a comfortable sort of vagueness about what later this year means. September collapses that vagueness. You've got four months. Four. And four is a real number. You can feel it. That's not a reason to panic, though. It's a reason to choose. Because if you don't choose now, If you move September into October and October into the holidays and the holiday into January and January is another year, that's a real thing that's gonna happen. It happens all the time. Not because people are lazy or uncommitted, but because postponement is self-perpetuating. The longer something stays unaddressed, the easier it is to keep not addressing it. The delay builds its own sort of inertia. But September offers a natural interruption to that inertia. It's a moment where the momentum of waiting can be paused long enough to ask, do I actually want to keep waiting? Or is there one decision I can make right now?... Here's where I want to spend some real time, because this is where most of us get stuck. When we delay a decision, we almost never tell ourselves we're delaying it. We tell ourselves we're preparing, we're gathering information, we're waiting for clarity, we're being thoughtful and responsible. We're not rushing into something important before we're really ready. And here's the uncomfortable truth: sometimes that's completely true. Sometimes you genuinely do need more information and to take more time. It's just the right choice. And sometimes the restraint is wisdom, not avoidance. But sometimes it isn't. And the two can look so much alike from the inside that it's genuinely hard to tell them apart. So here are four questions that can help make the distinction a little easier. First, has anything actually changed? When preparation is real, it produces something. You've got information you didn't have before. Your circumstances have shifted. You're understanding something more clearly than you could before. The time spent waiting has moved you closer to a genuine place of readiness to decide because of the information you've gathered. When it's postponement, that time passes, but nothing really changes. You're in exactly the same place you were a year ago, except now a year has passed. The question isn't What you still need to learn, it's whether you've ever feel ready enough to move in the first place. Second, what would you need in order to decide? Try finishing this sentence, honestly. I'll make this decision when. Now, if what you need is something specific and achievable, a particular piece of information, a financial threshold, a conversation you're planning to have, that's real preparation. If what you need is a feeling, Certainty, confidence, total clarity, the complete absence of doubt, that's a condition that's never fully going to be met. Certainty is almost never available before a real decision. It's something you build afterward through evidence. Number three, what is the postponement costing you? Postponement isn't neutral. It has a cost, especially in the form of an ongoing low-level feeling of stress, a narrowing of possibilities, a resentment that builds slowly. Or the particular exhaustion of just carrying something that's unresolved. When you ask yourself honestly what the delay is costing you and the answer is significant, that is important information. Number four, have you been here before? If this is a decision you've been on the edge of making multiple times, if you've circled back to the same question in January, in April, in August, and now again in September, that pattern tells you something. The waiting isn't producing readiness, it's producing More waiting. And at some point the question stops being, am I ready? And it becomes, am I willing? Because readiness is a feeling, but willingness is a choice. So let me get specific now because the most useful thing this episode can do is to help you land on one concrete thing, not a general intention to be more decisive, right? So I'm going to ask you to do something while you're listening or immediately after. I want you to take out your phone or get a piece of paper and complete this sentence. Just fill in the blanks. The decision I expect you to have made by now is fill in the blank. Write the first thing that comes to your mind. Not the most impressive thing, not the most complicated thing. The thing that's actually present for you right now. The one that has a little charge to it when you think about it. If more than one thing comes up, just pick the one that has been in the background the longest, the one that really just keeps coming back. The one that's been filed under I'll figure that out so many times you can't even remember. Now, look at what you wrote and ask is this something I genuinely need more time to figure out, or is this something I've already figured out and I haven't yet decided to act on? Because that's a real distinction. There are decisions that are genuinely unresolved. You don't know what you want, the information's incomplete, or the circumstances keep changing. Those decisions need more time, and giving them more time is absolutely appropriate. But there are also decisions. Where you know, you've known for a while. The question isn't what do I want? The question is what will it cost me if I go after what I want? And am I willing to pay that cost? For those decisions, more time doesn't produce more clarity. It produces more months of the same sense of unease because you still haven't done anything. You haven't taken action. If your decision is in that second category and you already know what you're waiting for isn't information but courage or permission or certainty that's never gonna get here. Then September is the moment to name that honestly. Don't be hard on yourself about the delay. The delay served a function. It was protecting you from something, from risk, from judgment, from the discomfort of being seen wanting something and not having it. That protection made sense at some point. The question now is whether you still need it or whether the cost of protection has exceeded the cost of what it was protecting you from. Here's the practical piece. I'm not going to ask you to resolve the decision this week. Some decisions are complex enough that resolving them takes real time, real conversations, and real planning. What I am going to ask you to do is make one move in the direction of resolution before September is over. Not a complete answer, just a move in that direction. If you've identified an overdue decision, the next question is: what is the smallest honest action that would move you toward making that decision? Not the action that would solve everything, or even the action that would require you to have complete certainty first. The action that's a genuine step rather than more preparation. Now, for some of you, that move is a conversation you've been putting off, and for others, it could be just booking the appointment or telling the person that matters what you're actually thinking about. And for some of you, it's stopping something. The ongoing yes, you keep saying, the arrangement you keep agreeing to, the the way you keep showing up for a situation that just isn't working anymore. The move doesn't have to be big. It just has to be real. It has to be something that if you did it, would mean you'd moved rather than continue to wait. So write it down. Give it a specific date, not a sometime in this month date. I want you to write down Tuesday, September 8th, Saturday, September 20th, before September 30th, I will fill in the blank. And then genuinely go do the thing. Because here's what I know about this time of year. The people who use September as an actual turning point don't do it by feeling more ready. They do it by deciding that the turning point is right now, even before the feeling of readiness gets there. The feeling of Being ready is almost always the result of taking action. It's not a prerequisite for taking action. So here's what I want you to take away from today. Let September give you the opportunity for a new beginning. Use it to make one thing visible that you've been allowing to stay in the background and to create enough contrast with the rest of the year that you can see it clearly and decide to do something about it. One overdue decision, named honestly. One move in the direction of making it a reality before September is over. That's not a small thing. It's exactly the kind of action that actually changes the whole trajectory of a year. Now, if what came up for you today is connected to a feeling of being ready, if your overdue decision is tangled up with waiting to feel more confident, more certain, prepared, or more like the version of yourself who does this kind of thing, I want to tell you about something I'm doing on September 12th. I'm teaching a free live class called Stop Waiting to Feel Ready. Simple enough. It's on September 12th at 10 a.m. Pacific, and it's exactly for the woman I've been describing today, the one who knows what she needs to do and still waiting for a feeling that may never come before she does it. Now in this class, we're going to look at why readiness works the way it does, which isn't the way most of us were taught, and what you can do instead when you're waiting for a signal that maybe isn't coming. It's free and it's live. And it's designed to move you from knowing to doing in a way that you can actually sustain. The link to register is in the show notes. September is the month you stop letting the year get away from you. You make one decision, one move, and one class, if that's what you need to get unstuck. You've been waiting long enough. Sign up for the class and let's make some real change. Until next time, bye for now.