Fresh Starts, Breadcrumbs, and Doing the Thing (Even When Your Brain’s Full)

This week in the Advance Queensland Stack+ STEM Female Founders Program, we wrapped up the Business Model Blueprint module with a stack round-up.  There was something especially honest about this one.

We had wins, we had pivots, we had procrastinations.
We had clarity colliding with constraint.

We saw what happens when founders are juggling vision, logistics, mental load, and the invisible labour of decision-making.

We weren’t just working on pitch decks or business models. We were witnessing the real process of becoming — the tension between vision and execution, the self-doubt that creeps in, the mess before momentum.

I knew this would be a heavy month — both in content and output. So when it came time to wrap, I wanted to make space for something real. Our mini session this week became a chance to talk about Fresh Starts.

Not the ones that come with fireworks and new-year energy.
The quiet ones.
The ones you create yourself — because you have to.
Because staying stuck isn’t serving you.
Because the plan changed.
Because you changed.

And in the middle of it all, one theme kept surfacing:
the moment you realise you just need to begin again.

Not dramatically. Not because things failed.
But because you're in a new moment — and it's time to reset, re-enter, and move forward from here.

What Science Says (That Our Brains Already Know)

The Fresh Start Effect was coined by behavioural scientist Katherine Milkman, along with Hengchen Dai and Jason Riis.

Their research showed that people are more likely to take goal-driven action after “temporal landmarks”  — moments that feel like a natural break from the past. You know the ones New Year’s Day. Mondays. Birthdays. Even a personal milestone a 40th, divorce or health scare.

These moments help us separate the old self from the new one.
They activate motivation.
They give us a line to cross — and a reason to move.

The real power in reflecting on Fresh Starts is you don't have to wait for big Temporal landmarks or the calendar to hand you permission.  This is really important for us as founders, innovators, creators, and business owners who often don't have anyone driving themselves forward and where a stuck can mean a really big stuck. 

And that’s what I wanted our cohort to walk away with this week:
The reminder that you can stop. Rethink. Re-enter.
Without guilt. Without drama. Without waiting for the world to give you a green light.

You don’t need the calendar’s permission.
You can draw your own line.
You can make your own fresh start — quietly, deliberately, and as often as you need to.

That’s the kind of reset I’ve come to value. The kind that sneaks up, not storms in.

The Breadcrumb I Followed Instead of the Plan I Had

In the middle of a particularly busy month — with lots of important-but-not-urgent tasks and a creeping sense o being slightly off-centre — I opened an old workbook intending to make a small tweak. A few hours (and many breadcrumb clicks) later, I’d rewritten whole sections, redesigned layouts, and rethought the entire flow.

It wasn’t on my priority list, I should have been doing something different . But it was something my brain needed to work through and I came back more focussed than when I started.

It wasn’t on my priority list. I should have been doing something else. But it was exactly the work my brain could handle — and I came back clearer because of it.

That breadcrumb led to an updated version of something I’ve long used myself and shared with cohorts — a workbook now called Do the Thing.

I didn’t set out to do this. It just evolved, like most things I build, from personal lessons, trial and error, patterns I saw in myself and others, and the desire to make the fog a little easier to move through.

It turned out to be a fresh start — not a stroll on the beach, maybe more like a slow uphill climb — but a temporal moment all the same.

Over time, I’ve learned that part of doing meaningful work is learning how you work, and not making yourself wrong for it. The systems I use now — whether it’s Do the Thing or what will eventually become Quiet the Busy — weren’t created in a burst of productivity. They were pieced together over time. From failure. From over-committing. From the friction between vision and bandwidth. From conversations. From books. From the founders I work with. From things I scribbled on post-its and didn’t want to lose.

In short: from being a bower bird of ideas, gathering scraps and building nests that feel like home.

The Lesson From the Stack+ Round-Up

In watching our cohort this week, I was reminded again that progress doesn’t always look like action.
Sometimes it’s the decision to stop doing the wrong things.
Sometimes it’s the moment of clarity after a messy week.
Sometimes it’s moving one sticky note on a Kanban board, and calling that a win.
Sometimes it's working with your brain and natural rhythm instead of the project plan

And sometimes it’s saying: “That plan doesn’t fit me anymore. I need a fresh one.”

That’s not weakness. That’s self-awareness.

That’s strategy.

One Last Thing

If this week didn’t go to plan —
If your goals shifted, your brain overloaded, or your energy dipped…

That doesn’t mean you’re behind.
It means you’re human.

You get to draw the line.
You get to make the moment.
You get to begin again — without waiting for everything to line up.

Make your own moment.
Fresh start.
Right now.
And do the thing.