Whilst perhaps not quite in the category of death and taxes, Blue Monday seems to rear its head with an ever-more-disenchanted sigh every January. Your close personal relationship with the tin of Quality Street may have broken down since New Year's Day. The tree is back in the attic, and your sitting room looks strangely bare and empty. Everyone has returned to work and school, and the carefree, relaxed mornings of Twixtmas are long behind us. It's enough to make even the most Tigger-like of us feel a little despondent.
If you're returning to work in a role that no longer sets your inner Christmas lights a-twinkling, you might have a particularly acute case of the blues this year. You may be feeling... well, just a little flat. Uninspired. Perhaps slightly unchallenged. You wouldn't be alone; research shows that January is a flashpoint for career dissatisfaction for many people. Maybe you've made yourself a New Year's Resolution that this year, you'll change professional direction, or retrain in a new field. Might it be that 2026 is the moment for you to launch a big push forward in your career, or climb the promotion ladder? Have you settled your children into a new school and are you finally finding time to focus on your own ambitions again? All of these are fabulous new goals for the coming year but, as the saying goes, things sometimes get worse before they get better. Sometimes a little bit of dissatisfaction is exactly the catalyst you need to push you up and out of your comfort zone, and into action...
The internet would have you believe that Blue Monday is something to be conquered. It's packed to the rafters with "Blue Monday Survival Guides", or articles on "Self-care Tips to Handle Winter Blues". But what if - just bear with us here for a moment - we didn't treat it as something to be ignored, or pushed down or denied? What if we viewed it as a useful warning light, alerting us to the fact that something needs to change, from prosaic to promising? What if - whisper it - we were to lean in to Blue Monday?
If the moment is right to embark on a new adventure, and to get your snowflakes sparkling once again, you've come to the right place. Our 9-2-3 team are experts in talking you through possible options, and helping you to think about what you need from any new move. Whether you want to seek out a totally different field, or make some beneficial tweaks to your existing career path, we're here to help. We can talk about term-time-only roles, converse about compressed hours and wax lyrical about working from home.
We love building warm working relationships with our 9-2-3 community, and it's important to us that we find you a great match, which fits your circumstances perfectly. By the time you're settled in your new role, we often feel that we know our candidates, and what makes them tick, really well. This January, don't stay out in the cold. Give us a call. We don't believe that the January Blues are a bad thing. Trust us: we're looking forward to turning your midnight indigos to brilliant, shimmering blue skies in 2026.