Ready or not, summer is officially over with the upcoming Labor-Day Weekend. I remember when I lived in NYC years ago, and had a share in a summer house on Shelter Island; I remember the slow, hot crawl of a bumper-to-bumper trafficky drive back into the city on Labor Day’s Monday night. We were all feeling the so-called Sunday night blues…knowing that we were going back to work the next day… those summer days behind us. Maybe you’ve had your pedal to the metal all summer long, but even so summer just has a different vibe.

So now it’s time for that September re-set. How about a re-set that inspires you so that as September glides into place we come back to school (it always feels like school again, right?) and regular schedules feeling re-energized, with our sights set on ending this year with personal and professional goals accomplished?

What’s Your Re-set Strategy?

Are you one of the people who’s been waiting for summer to end before lining up your thoughts about what’s next? Been thinking that summer’s the slow time for hiring, so you’ve put off getting your job search strategy in place? Understandably, you might have opted for that much needed vacation time to recover and process; to enjoy the longer days and summer activities and travel before being ready to envision the rest of your year. But now September, unbelievably, is upon us. Here are some ways to ease back in to un-summer life without feeling the end-of-summer-blues.

Re-Energize Your Daily Life with These 4 Actions:

1. Prioritize what will help you have the most productive days ahead. Create accountability for yourself by getting important activities into your calendar. Depending on where you are in your life, your September may already have Back-to-School nights on your calendar, or maybe holiday celebrations to plan. But this could also be the time to commit to attending a conference, a new Meetup group, or a Ted-X event to re-energize your career and contacts.

• Check out class offerings at extension schools at local universities or community colleges, or check out the tech boot-camps at places like General Assembly or Flatiron School Access Labs (and so many others) to ramp up new career direction options.

• Resolve to take really good care of you and your mental/emotional self for the rest of the year. If you’re one of the millions of people who are struggling with overwhelm and anxiety, you can take better care of yourself by learning how to quiet your mind and your body. Find a community of people who are smart and motivated, and similarly want to achieve a better sense of balance and calm. In LA, you can find mindfulness classes taught by UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center teachers at MARC.UCLA.edu, or go to one of the meditation studios like MNDFL in New York City, or any of the hundreds of meditation centers and studios cropping up across the country. You might also want to attend a retreat – like the Women’s Empowerment Retreat I’m hosting in Costa Rica December 2-7^th – where you can have fun, be with other people, in a beautiful place, and also learn some new ways to connect with yourself, learning new strategies to bring home to continue living that balance and authenticity.

• Create that vision for yourself of where you want to be going. What does your next job, or way of working, need to look like? Create a list of the skills and actions that keep you feeling energized and in your zone of genius. If you know you’re doing too much of the work that drags you down, and not enough of what lights you up, then it’s definitely time to find, propose, or create the job (or company) you need to be doing. Let that vision pull you to what’s next. Start sharing that vision with others – if they’re the people that will encourage you to take steps towards that vision. If they aren’t those supporters, don’t say a thing, and get busy finding the people who see what you see.

Let September be the motivating month that gets you back into the groove of doing your best work. Find those actions and people who energize you, and who have your back as you achieve what you know will help you to feel like your best self.