Before the Year Ends: Choose the Person You Want to Become
Four Months Is Not Nothing
By the time most people arrive at the end of September, they have already written off the year. January's resolutions have long since dissolved.
The progress that was supposed to happen has not. And the instinct is to acknowledge this quietly, manage the remaining months as best you can, and prepare to try again properly when January arrives.
This is a significant waste of time.
October to December is twelve weeks.
Approximately ninety days. That is long enough to build a habit that sticks. Long enough to make a meaningful change to your health, your relationships, your professional direction or your sense of self.
Long enough to arrive at January as someone meaningfully different from who you were in September — rather than someone who spent September to December waiting for January to feel ready.
The question is not whether the time is sufficient. It is whether you are willing to use it deliberately rather than letting it pass by default.
Why Identity-Based Change Works Better Than Goal-Based Change
Most change attempts are goal-based. I want to lose weight, earn more, exercise more, drink less, read more books, be a better parent.
The goal is an outcome — a destination. And destinations have a problem: once you arrive, or fail to arrive, the effort tends to stop. The goal was the thing you were working towards, not the person doing the working.
Identity-based change starts from a different place. Instead of asking 'what do I want to achieve?' it asks 'who do I want to be?' Instead of 'I want to run more' it asks 'what would a person who takes care of their body do this morning?' Instead of 'I want to read more' it asks 'what would a person who values learning do with this hour?'
The distinction matters because identity, once established, is self-sustaining in a way that goals are not. Goals get completed or abandoned.
Identity provides an ongoing reference point for daily decisions, without requiring constant willpower or renewed motivation.
The September Audit
Before choosing who you want to become in the final quarter, it is worth being clear about where you actually are right now.
Not where you planned to be. Where you actually are.
A brief audit across five areas:
- Health — What is the honest state of your energy, sleep, movement and physical self-care?
- Work — Are you growing, coasting or shrinking? Does the work still fit you?
- Relationships — Which connections are nourishing you and which are depleting you?
- Personal standards — Are you keeping the commitments you make to yourself?
- Direction — Do you have a sense of where you are heading, or are you managing the present without orientation?
For each area, one honest sentence. What is actually true right now?
Choosing the Person
From the audit, one area will feel most alive with possibility — or most urgently in need of attention. That is the area to focus on.
The question to ask is not 'what do I want to achieve in this area?' It is: 'who would I need to be in this area for things to look genuinely different by December?'
Some examples of what that might look like:
- Not 'I want to be fitter' but 'I am someone who prioritises physical health without making it a performance.'
- Not 'I want to be less stressed at work' but 'I am someone who protects their energy and manages their workload honestly.'
- Not 'I want to be a better parent' but 'I am someone who is genuinely present when I am with my children.'
- Not 'I want to stop drinking so much' but 'I am someone who makes deliberate choices about how I spend my evenings.'
The identity statement does not have to be perfect. It needs to be genuinely yours — something you actually care about, for reasons that are actually yours — and specific enough to guide daily decisions.
Building Towards That Person:
Ask what they would do today
The identity-based approach works through daily decisions rather than big declarations. Each morning, ask: what would the person I am becoming do today?
Not what would the perfect version do — what would a person who genuinely held this identity do, given the actual conditions of this actual day?
Some days the answer is significant.
Most days it is small: they would go to bed at a decent hour, make the phone call, close the laptop at a reasonable time, say the thing they have been avoiding, not eat the thing they are using to manage the Stress.
Small decisions, consistently made, in the direction of the identity you are building.
Collect evidence deliberately
Each time you make a decision that is consistent with the identity you are building, notice it. Not with excessive celebration — simply notice.
'That is the kind of thing the person I am becoming does.' The evidence accumulates.
The identity becomes more real, more felt, more automatic.
You stop performing it and start being it.
Let the first behaviour be small enough to be reliable
The identity needs a behavioural anchor — something specific and regular that represents it. Make that anchor small enough to be almost non-negotiable.
The person who prioritises their health walks for fifteen minutes before work. Not an hour. Fifteen minutes.
The person who protects their evenings turns the laptop off at 7pm. Not restructures their career. 7pm.
Small anchors build large identities.
The evidence of a kept small commitment, repeated across weeks, does more for the sense of genuinely becoming someone than any grand gesture.
Two Examples of Identity-Based Final Quarters:
The person who stopped waiting to feel ready
Priya had spent most of the year telling herself she would start her coaching qualification when things settled down at work.
In September she asked a different question: who do I need to be to make this happen, given that things may never fully settle down?
The answer: someone who treats professional development as a protected appointment rather than a bonus if time permits.
She booked the course, put the study sessions in the diary as non-negotiable appointments, and protected them with the same rigour she brought to client meetings.
She completed the first module by December.
The person who chose presence over performance
Marcus had spent years being a technically good father — present for the events, organised for the logistics, reliable for the basics.
What he was not was genuinely present.
He was usually thinking about work.
His identity shift: I am someone who is actually here when I am with my children. One evening a week with the phone in another room.
One Saturday morning activity where he was fully engaged rather than physically present and mentally elsewhere.
By December, his relationship with both children had shifted in ways he had not expected from two small changes. The identity did the work. He just had to hold it.
The Month-by-Month Frame
October: establish the anchor behaviour. Small, reliable, consistent. Build the evidence that the identity is real.
November: raise the threshold slightly. Add one thing to the anchor. Notice what is changing.
December: hold what you have built through the disruption of the festive period. Not perfectly — minimally. Keep the floor.
January: arrive already changed, rather than planning to change.
Three Final Reflection Questions
- Who would you be by December if you used the next four months deliberately — and who would you be if you waited for January instead?
- What is the single most important identity shift that would have the most meaningful impact on your daily life?
- What is the smallest possible behaviour that would represent that identity in action this week?
Key Takeaways
- Four months is sufficient time to build a meaningful identity shift if used deliberately.
- Identity-based change is more durable than goal-based change because the identity provides an ongoing reference point, not just a destination.
- The question is not what you want to achieve — it is who you need to be for things to look genuinely different.
- Small anchor behaviours build large identities through the accumulation of evidence over repeated daily decisions.
- Arriving at January already changed is considerably more useful than arriving with fresh plans to change.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Is this not just reframing goals as identity?
Partly, but the reframing matters.
The difference between 'I want to exercise more' and 'I am someone who takes care of their body' is not just linguistic — it changes the decision-making process.
The first asks 'did I hit my goal?' The second asks 'is this what that person would do?' Those produce different decisions under pressure.
What if I choose the wrong identity to build towards?
You will learn from it.
The process of building towards a specific identity tells you whether it is genuinely yours or one you thought you should want.
That information is useful and worth having. You can adjust.
What if the final quarter gets disrupted — illness, family difficulties, work pressure?
Hold the minimum. The floor you defined in your anchor behaviour is what keeps the identity alive through disruption.
You are not trying to maintain full performance through a difficult period — you are trying to maintain enough continuity that resuming is easier than starting again.
How is this different from everything else I have tried?
It may not be structurally different. What tends to make the difference is specificity, scale and genuine ownership.
If the identity is genuinely yours, the anchor behaviour is genuinely small enough to be reliable, and the commitment is to a process rather than a perfect outcome, the conditions for this to work are meaningfully better than they were for previous attempts.
Can Simon help with this?
Yes.
The free consultation is a good place to work out what the meaningful identity shift is for you specifically, and what kind of support — if any — would make it more likely to happen.
It is a conversation, not a commitment.
The Person You Want to Become Is Built in Ordinary Days
Not in dramatic decisions.
Not in January. In the accumulated weight of small, consistent choices made in the direction of something that genuinely matters to you — starting now, with what you have, in the actual conditions of your actual life.
Four months. Choose the person. Begin this week.
Simon Taylor offers a free 30-minute consultation for people who want to use the final quarter of the year to make a genuine shift — not just plan to. It is a conversation about what that shift might be and what it would take to make it real.
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