The Fresh Start Effect: Why September Might Beat January for Voice Goals

I am a complete sucker for a symbolic new beginning.

New Year’s Day? Brilliant. New year, new me. This will definitely be the year I exercise every morning, learn another language and stop opening the fridge when I already know perfectly well what’s in it.

Then, when that version of me has quietly disappeared by about the third week of January, I rather like Chinese New Year because it gives me a perfectly respectable opportunity to have another go.

A resit, if you will.

But there is another fresh start that I think I might like even more.

September.

There is something about the beginning of a new academic year that still gets me. Fresh notebooks. New stationery. Sharpened pencils. That very particular late-August feeling that summer is coming to an end and it might be time to get my act together.

This is despite the fact that I finished my own formal education rather a long time ago and nobody has required me to own a pencil case for years.

Every September I find myself asking the same questions.

What do I want to get better at?

What have I been meaning to learn?

What have I let slide?

What would I like to be able to do by this time next year that I cannot quite do now?

And apparently, this isn’t just me looking for an excuse to buy another notebook.

There is some rather interesting psychology behind it.

What is the Fresh Start Effect?

The Fresh Start Effect is the name psychologists give to our tendency to feel more motivated to pursue goals after a date that feels like a new beginning.

In 2014, researchers Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis published a study in Management Science looking at what happens after what they called temporal landmarks.

These are moments that divide our lives into mental chapters: the start of a week, a month, a year, a birthday, a holiday or the beginning of a new academic term.

The researchers looked at things including Google searches related to dieting, visits to a university gym and people’s decisions to commit to goals. They found that aspirational behaviour increased after these kinds of landmarks.

In other words, our brains seem to rather like a clean page.

A temporal landmark creates a little psychological dividing line between the person I was before and the person I am going to be now.

Which helps explain the peculiar optimism of January.

And birthdays.

And Mondays. (well, maybe less Mondays…)

And, rather wonderfully, the start of a new academic year.

So while there is nothing magical lurking inside the 1st of September, there may be something genuinely useful about treating September as a reset point.

Why September makes such a good fresh start

I actually think September has several advantages over January.

January arrives after Christmas, when many of us are tired, cold, financially bruised and approximately 63% Quality Street.

September is different.

We have just come out of summer. Work begins to find its rhythm again. Schools reopen. Classes start. Rehearsals return. Projects get moving. There is a sense of things beginning rather than simply recovering from December.

More importantly, many of us spent the first eighteen or twenty-odd years of our lives being taught that September is when you begin again.

New teacher.

New timetable.

New subjects.

New goals.

Even years later, that association can still be remarkably powerful.

So perhaps the question isn’t:

What is my New Year’s resolution?

Perhaps there is another useful question:

What would I like to learn this year?

I like that one much more.

And what about your voice?

If there is something about your voice or communication that you’ve been meaning to work on, the beginning of a new academic year is a rather good moment to stop meaning to do it and actually start.

Maybe you want to speak more clearly in meetings.

Perhaps you notice yourself racing through presentations because nerves send your speaking rate into Formula One territory.

Maybe people regularly ask you to repeat particular words.

You might want to develop an RP or General American accent for acting work.

Perhaps English isn’t your first language and you’d like to soften certain features of your accent, not because there is anything wrong with your accent, but because you want to make communication easier in particular professional situations.

Maybe your voice tires by four o’clock.

Or you would simply like to sound a little more like the person you feel yourself to be when you open your mouth.

Those are all perfectly legitimate voice goals.

And they are trainable.

Your voice is not just carrying the words

There is also good evidence that listeners respond to much more than the actual words we say.

Research into vocal confidence has found that changes in features such as speaking rate, intonation, pitch and intensity can alter how confident a speaker sounds to listeners. Other experiments have found that those perceptions of vocal confidence can then affect how persuasive a message seems.

That does not mean there is one special “confident voice” we should all learn to imitate.

It means something much more useful.

Your voice is communication.

Pace matters. Pauses matter. Intonation matters. Breath matters. Where you place emphasis matters. The amount of choice and control you have over those things matters.

Voice coaching isn’t about replacing your voice with somebody else’s.

It is about giving you more options.

The problem with setting a goal like “improve my voice”

Here is where September enthusiasm can go horribly wrong.

“I want to improve my voice” sounds like a goal, but it isn’t really one.

Neither is:

“I want to be more confident.”

“I want to improve my accent.”

“I want to be better at public speaking.”

They’re destinations without a map.

When I work with someone on their voice, one of the first useful things we can do is get much more specific.

Where does the difficulty actually show up?

What are you currently doing?

What do you want to be able to do instead?

Because “I want to be more confident in meetings” might actually mean:

“I rush the first thirty seconds whenever I’m presenting.”

Or:

“My voice gets quieter when somebody senior interrupts me.”

Or:

“I know my subject inside out but my sentences keep trailing away at the end.”

Now we have something we can work with.

Forget the 21-day voice transformation

This is also where I must perform one of my less glamorous duties as a voice coach and spoil a motivational quote.

You’ve probably heard that it takes 21 days to form a habit.

Sadly, your tongue has not read that book.

Nor has your larynx.

One of the most frequently cited studies of real-world habit formation was carried out by Phillippa Lally and colleagues at University College London. Participants chose a new everyday behaviour and repeated it in a consistent context while the researchers tracked how automatic the behaviour became.

The famous figure from the study is 66 days.

But even that needs explaining.

Sixty-six days was the median. Individual results varied enormously, from 18 to 254 days.

So 66 days isn’t another magic deadline to replace 21 days with. Different behaviours take different amounts of time to settle, and different people learn at different rates.

And there is another finding from that study that I think is far more encouraging.

Missing one opportunity did not materially derail the habit-forming process.

I love that.

Miss Tuesday?

Fine.

Carry on Wednesday.

No guilt. No starting again from Day One. No ceremonial burning of the notebook.

Consistency matters far more than perfection.

Voice work is practice, not punishment

This fits very neatly with the way I approach voice and accent coaching.

If you are changing an accent, a speaking habit, your use of breath or the way you articulate a particular sound, you are asking your brain and body to learn a different pattern.

Understanding the new pattern is only part of it.

You then have to use it.

And use it again.

And use it when you’re thinking about something else.

Eventually, the aim is not to be sitting in a meeting thinking:

“Tongue forward. Jaw loose. Breath. Stress the important word. Shaun said something about resonance. Oh God, they’ve asked me a question.”

The aim is for the new choice to become available when you need it without requiring quite so much conscious thought.

That takes practice.

Fortunately, it doesn’t necessarily mean hours of practice.

A better way to set your September voice goal

If you want to use the Fresh Start Effect rather than simply enjoying it for three days and then forgetting all about it, make your goal small enough to survive contact with real life.

Try this:

• Choose one outcome. Not “fix my voice”, but something observable, such as “I want to slow down when presenting”, “I want a reliable RP /r/”, “I want to stop losing vocal energy at the end of long sentences” or “I want to feel comfortable speaking up in meetings.”
• Notice your starting point. Record yourself, listen back and identify what is actually happening rather than what you think is happening. This is often surprisingly revealing.
• Attach practice to something that already happens. Five minutes after your morning coffee. Ten minutes before your first call. A pronunciation exercise while walking the dog. Research on “implementation intentions” has found that deciding in advance when and where you will act makes goals more likely to happen.
• Practise little and often. You are trying to create something repeatable, not stage a three-hour vocal boot camp followed by eleven days of avoidance.
• Test it in real life. Use the new skill in a phone call, presentation, audition, meeting or conversation. Voice work has to escape the exercise eventually. Otherwise you’ve simply become extremely good at doing voice exercises.

That is a voice goal.

Specific. Practisable. Testable.

Much more useful than “be better at talking”.

Why the plan matters more than the resolution

There is another lovely piece of research here.

Psychologists Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran reviewed 94 independent studies looking at something called implementation intentions.

The basic idea is wonderfully unglamorous.

Instead of saying:

“I will practise my voice more.”

you decide:

“After I make my first coffee in the morning, I will practise this exercise for five minutes.”

Or:

“Before my Tuesday team meeting, I will spend two minutes releasing my breath and speaking through my opening sentence.”

This is sometimes called an if-then plan.

If this situation happens, then I will do this behaviour.

Across those studies, implementation intentions had a meaningful positive effect on whether people actually achieved their goals.

Which rather confirms something coaches discover very quickly.

Motivation is lovely.

A plan is better.

So what could your voice goal be?

If I were setting vocal goals for the new academic year, I wouldn’t choose ten.

I’d choose one.

Maybe you want to finally get comfortable with RP.

Maybe you have an audition accent you keep avoiding.

Maybe you want clearer English pronunciation without losing the personality and identity in your natural accent.

Maybe you need your voice to survive a day of teaching, presenting or talking to clients.

Maybe you’d like more vocal presence when you’re leading a meeting.

Maybe you want to stop apologising for your voice before you’ve even started speaking.

Or perhaps you don’t know what needs changing. You just know that the voice coming out isn’t quite doing what you want it to do.

That’s fine too.

Part of good voice coaching is diagnosis.

Sometimes the biggest improvement doesn’t come from working harder. It comes from discovering what is actually worth working on.

Every day is a school day

I still like September.

I still like the feeling of a fresh notebook.

And yes, I will probably set myself several wildly optimistic goals this year, abandon at least one of them and then pretend that was part of the plan all along.

But I do think there is something useful in regularly asking ourselves:

What do I want to learn next?

We spend years assuming education is something with a beginning and an end.

School.

University.

Training.

Finished.

Except, of course, it isn’t.

Every day is a school day.

There is always something else to understand, practise, discover or get slightly better at.

So what is yours going to be this year?

And if there is something vocal on the list, whether that’s your accent, clarity, confidence, public speaking, presentation skills or simply having more control over the way you sound, I may be able to help.

You don’t need a completely new voice.

You might just need to discover what the one you’ve already got can do.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Fresh Start Effect?

The Fresh Start Effect is a psychological phenomenon in which people become more motivated to pursue goals after meaningful dates or “temporal landmarks”, such as the beginning of a week, month, year, birthday or academic term. Research by Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis found increases in goal-related behaviour following these fresh-start moments.

Is September really better than January for setting goals?

Not necessarily for everybody. The research does not prove that September is universally better than January. It does show that the beginning of a new academic period can act as a powerful temporal landmark, which makes September a useful opportunity to reassess goals and begin new habits.

How long does it take to change a speaking habit or accent?

There is no universal number. A widely cited UCL study of everyday habit formation found a median of 66 days, with considerable variation between individuals and behaviours. Accent and voice development also involve learning and practising new patterns, so regular practice over time is more useful than expecting a transformation after an arbitrary number of days.

How often should I practise voice or accent exercises?

Short, regular practice is generally more useful than waiting for occasional long practice sessions. The important thing is that the practice is specific, repeatable and gradually transferred into real speaking situations.

What is a good voice goal?

A good voice goal is specific enough to practise and measure. Instead of “I want to sound better”, try something such as “I want to slow my speaking pace during presentations”, “I want to produce this vowel consistently in my RP accent”, or “I want to maintain vocal energy through the end of my sentences.”

Can a voice coach help me decide what I need to work on?

Yes. You do not need to arrive knowing exactly what needs changing. A voice coach can listen to your speech, identify the patterns making the greatest difference and help you build a practical training plan around your goals, whether they involve accent coaching, clear speech, vocal confidence, public speaking or professional communication.

Research behind this article

Dai, H., Milkman, K. L. & Riis, J. (2014). The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behaviour. Management Science, 60(10), 2563–2582.

Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W. & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40, 998–1009.

Gollwitzer, P. M. & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-analysis of Effects and Processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119.

Guyer, J. J., Fabrigar, L. R. & Vaughan-Johnston, T. I. (2019). Speech Rate, Intonation, and Pitch: Investigating the Bias and Cue Effects of Vocal Confidence on Persuasion. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 45(3).