How do you feel about the approaching festive season? Are Christmas and the New Year brick walls on the approaching horizon that inevitably block your business path as people just stop making decisions or are they just lines in the snow that you can cross without breaking your stride – and time to join in with the childish fun?

It’s just a short break.

The Christmas phenomenon is theoretically simply a 10-day hiatus when everyone takes holiday at the same time. It is a brief period in the calendar when it is difficult to get any sort of financial transaction done here in the UK beyond paying the bin man his Boxing Day bonus. Actually, now that I think of it, even that is difficult since our corruption-paranoid council is in the habit of rotating the collection teams. It must have solved a problem, I wonder which one?

Waste collection aside, the period in question is actually really rather small – much shorter than the summer shut down with its huge penumbra that seems to extend for months. But Christmas day, small and neat as it is, reduces our keenness for action like a black hole swallowing up everything in the 4-week vicinity of its dark centre. The festive phenomenon is an indiscriminate magnet for everything to do with making progress in business: focus, energy, plans, determination, money, attention span, resources and even good health. All seem to vanish into the void of Christmas without trace or explanation. What is going on, year after year? Should we not be told?

Back to childhood?

Could it simply be that our collective wish to forget all our problems and have fun is to blame? Maybe the twinkling lights and toy advertisements on TV rake up past demons who must be appeased with childish attention. Could it be that the twinkliness of Christmas, like the tortured call of the ice cream van’s crazy music, still has the power to make our collective pulses race? To hypnotise us? To make us forget what we are supposed to be doing as rational adults? Might it be that the daily reminders of the approach of the festive season unrelentingly chip away at our will to execute on business strategy, to be active in sales and marketing, to maintain business rigour and all the other things that we must do to keep our organisations up there, out there and growing.

Christmas seems to act upon our common sense to the degree that ‘sense’ becomes as uncommon as a perfectly roasted turkey. And yet I think the dimension of the festive season that really sends us beyond the fringes of reason is the notion of ‘The New Year’.

A new and better place? I think not.

We are annually taken over by the belief, at a profound, pre-conscious level that everything on the other side will be different and, more catastrophically, is a long, long way off. We start to foster irrational thoughts of new beginnings, fresh starts and clean slates. A new bright world where we can stride out and achieve the unachievable. Conversely, people with targets, having had their counters reset to zero and their quotas increased must face the nail-biting prospect of starting from scratch. But is there really any relationship between either of these two positions and reality? Don’t be daft.

The solemn reality that we must face is that Tuesday 3^rd of January, will be like any other day. The third of January does not know that it is the first day of our business year, 2012. The universe, in keeping the world spinning and the stars evenly spaced around us does not take into account our puny notions of time and relativity. It will, in the starkest reality, be a day like any other except for in one, essential way: how we feel about it.

Our feelings about the day, the preceding weeks, and about the weeks that follow will dictate how we fare: whether we overcome obstacles, if we meet our targets, the degree to which we feel fine, stressed or ill. The degree to which we are taken in by the idea that Christmas and New Year are a genuinely significant existential watershed will determine what we do now and in turn affect what happens around us in 6½ weeks’ time, and far beyond. At the risk of sounding like a Harry Potter film character, you and I shape events in the future by how we act now. You and I can actually change our destinies. How? Mainly, by not allowing our good sense and adult judgment to be sucked into the nonsensical black hole of the approaching holiday season.

Easily said, but how? By asking ourselves 1 simple question every time, in the next few weeks, that we are about to make, or postpone, a notable decision:

If it was 1^st September today,

what would I decide to do?

If your answer is substantially different to what you had decided to do when you factored in that you only had 28 working days left until Christmas, go and splash cold water on your face and think again.

The markers that we use to shape time, events like New Year’s Eve, a flotation date or the financial year end do indeed help us to make sense of what we have achieved and what’s coming next. And yet these same markers can also make us suckers for acting with only the instant result in mind.

Reckoning our objectives and achievements against days, weeks, months and quarters encourages us to go for only the most obvious goals, to shoot for the nearest horizons. Of course, chopping up our years into seasons and holidays does provide us with rest time and relief from our problems and fatiguing work but it also prevents us from having a really good go at things, from taking the long view, from tackling big problems with cooler, calmer minds.

Surrender but not yet.

And if there is one thing that we need as we hurtle towards the coming festive black hole it’s a cool, calm mind that will prompt appropriate action and not wait for the perfect day that will never come.

And yet, as the magic days draw close, their attraction will be too strong for you and I to resist. And then, for a few days, it will be time to surrender ourselves.  Because the part of you and me that will enjoy Christmas and New Year the most will not be the sensible adult who runs a business, but the child inside who chases ice cream vans and still believes that anything is possible.