It’s early January. Fresh notebook. New determination. Clear goal: this is the year you make serious progress towards partnership. You’ve written down your intentions: “Build my profile. Win more work. Delegate more”
By February, that notebook is buried under client files. By April, you’ve given up pretending. By December, you’re making the same promises for next year.
Here’s the brutal truth: most New Year intentions for career progression fail by Valentine’s Day. Not because you’re not committed, but because intentions without a proper plan and time to execute are just wishful thinking.
The difference between professionals who make progress and those who don’t isn’t talent or work ethic. It’s whether they’ve opened their diary and blocked out time to work on their career – and then protected that time like it’s their most important client meeting.
In this episode, you’ll discover the simple system that turns January intentions into actual progress.
In this episode you will learn:
- Why “do more business development” isn’t a plan (and why your brain can’t act on vague instructions)
- How to create your ONE BIG FOCUS for the next 90 days (the one thing that will drive your career forward the most)
- The only thing that actually works: scheduling time in your diary and protecting it like a client meeting
- Why you can’t create time for partnership-level work without ruthlessly delegating everything that doesn’t need to be done at your level
If you find this episode useful, don’t forget to like it and then subscribe so you don’t miss another episode.
What help is out there for you to progress your career in the professions?
If you’re thinking, ‘I get this, but I need help identifying my ONE BIG FOCUS and creating a system that forces me to work on my career’, our on-demand course “How to Truly Commit to Moving Your Career Forward” is designed exactly for this.
The course takes you through creating a career development plan you’re actually motivated to implement. You’ll identify your ONE BIG FOCUS, create your Default Diary, and build habits that support your progression. By the end, you’ll have a concrete plan and protected time in your diary to execute it.
If you’re unsure where to focus, start with our free Partnership Readiness Assessment. It takes 12 minutes and shows you exactly which key indicators to focus on to progress your career.
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Hello, and welcome!
It’s early January. You’ve got a fresh notebook, a new determination, and a clear goal: this is the year you’re going to make serious progress towards partnership. You’ve written down your intentions: “Build my profile. Win more work. Delegate more. Develop my team.”
By February, that notebook is buried under client files. That conference you had planned to go to got cancelled because a partner needs urgent help. Your business development time? Well, something more urgent came up.
Sound familiar?
Here’s the brutal truth: most New Year intentions for career progression fail by Valentine’s Day. Not because you’re not committed. Not because you don’t want it badly enough. But because intentions without a proper plan and the time to execute that plan are just wishful thinking.
If you want 2026 to actually be different, you need to turn those vague intentions into concrete actions. And that starts right now.
This is the How to Make Partner podcast with me, Heather Townsend. The author of Poised for Partnership, and co-author of How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life. In this podcast, I will be highlighting some of the great stuff in our Progress To Partner Academy. New episodes are released weekly, so press subscribe so you never miss a new episode.
Right, let’s talk about why your January intentions keep failing and what to do about it.
Every January, I watch the same pattern play out. Professionals tell me their goals for the year: “I’m going to do more business development.” “I’m going to build my profile.” “I’m going to win my own work.”
These sound like goals, but they’re not. They’re vague wishes. And vague wishes don’t survive contact with the reality of February’s workload.
Here’s what happens. You start January with good intentions. Then a partner asks you to help with an urgent client matter. A deadline moves forward. A colleague goes off sick and you need to cover their work. Before you know it, six weeks have passed and you haven’t done a single thing towards your career goals.
You tell yourself: “I’ll get back to it next month.” But next month brings the same pressures. And the month after that. By April, you’ve given up pretending. By December, you’re making the same promises for next year.
The problem isn’t your commitment. The problem is that you never turned your intentions into a proper plan with time allocated to actually do the work.
Why “do more business development” isn’t a plan
Let me ask you something. If I said to you, “I want you to close this transaction by the end of March,” you’d immediately start thinking about what needs to happen. What are the steps? What’s the timeline? Who needs to be involved? When will you do the work?
But when you say to yourself, “I’m going to do more business development this year,” what does that actually mean? More than what? How much more? By when? What specific actions will you take? When exactly will you do them?
Without answers to these questions, “do more business development” is just noise. It’s not a plan. And without a plan, it won’t happen.
In Chapter 3 of Poised for Partnership, I talk about why generic goals like this fail. Your brain can’t act on vague instructions. It needs specificity. It needs to know exactly what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, and how you’ll know you’ve succeeded.
The ONE BIG FOCUS approach
This is where the ONE BIG FOCUS approach comes in. Instead of trying to tackle everything at once – which is a recipe for doing nothing – you pick one thing to focus on for the next 90 days.
Your ONE BIG FOCUS is the one thing you want to change or achieve in the next 90 days that will drive your career forward the most.
It might be: “Win £120k of new work by the end of March.”
Or: “Systematically delegate so I have five hours a week for business development.”
Or: “Build relationships with five potential referral partners by the end of Q1.”
Notice these are specific. You can measure whether you’ve achieved them. And most importantly, you can break them down into actions that you can schedule into your diary.
Because here’s the key point: if it’s not in your diary, it won’t happen. Your good intentions will be crushed by urgent client work every single time.
The only thing that actually works: scheduling it
Once you’ve identified your ONE BIG FOCUS, here’s what separates the people who make progress from the people who don’t: they open their diary and block out time to work on it. Not “I’ll find time.” Not “I’ll fit it in when things calm down.” They actually schedule it like they would a client meeting.
Say your ONE BIG FOCUS is winning £120k of new work. You need time to identify opportunities, have conversations, prepare proposals. So you open your diary and you block it out. Tuesday afternoons for business development calls. Friday mornings for strategic thinking and proposal writing. Whatever works for your diary.
And then – this is the crucial bit – you protect that time. When a partner asks if you’re free Tuesday afternoon, you say “I’ve got something in the diary, but I could do Wednesday morning?” You don’t volunteer that the “something” is calling past clients. It’s in your diary. It’s protected.
Now, you’re probably thinking: “But I don’t have five hours a week spare! My diary is already rammed!”
Fair point. Which is why you need to get ruthless about delegation. Every piece of work sitting on your desk that could be done by someone more junior is time you’re stealing from your partnership progression. If you can’t delegate, you can’t create time. And if you can’t create time, you can’t make partner. It’s that simple.
Making it stick
Here’s the difference between this year and last year: last year, you had intentions. This year, you’re going to open your diary right now and block out time.
Not later. Not when you’ve finished this episode. Right now. Pause this podcast if you need to. Open your diary. Find two or three hours this week where you can work on your ONE BIG FOCUS. Block it out.
Because if you don’t schedule it now, it won’t happen. Something else will fill that time. And we’ll be having this same conversation next January.
The professionals who make partner aren’t the ones with the best intentions. They’re the ones who schedule time to work on their career and then protect that time like it’s their most important client. Because they understand that they are their most important client.
Your January intentions will fail unless you turn them into scheduled actions in your diary. That’s it. That’s the whole secret.
Now, if you’re thinking, “I get this, but I need help identifying my ONE BIG FOCUS and creating a system that forces me to work on my career,” that’s exactly what our on-demand course “How to Truly Commit to Moving Your Career Forward” is designed for.
This course takes you through creating a career development plan you’re actually motivated to implement. You’ll identify your ONE BIG FOCUS for the next 90 days, create what I call a Default Diary to protect time for career development, and build the habits that will support your progression. By the end of the course, you’ll have a concrete plan and protected time in your diary to execute it.
If you’re unsure where to focus your efforts, start with our free Partnership Readiness Assessment. It takes about 12 minutes and gives you an instant report showing exactly which key indicators you need to focus on. This will help you identify your ONE BIG FOCUS.
I’ve popped a link to the Partnership Readiness Assessment and our Progress To Partner Academy directly in the show notes for this episode. Also in the show notes, you’ll find links to my books – Poised for Partnership and How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life – so you can easily find them on Amazon. And as a thank you for listening, there’s also a link for a 10% discount on annual membership for our Progress To Partner Academy using the code PODCAST10.
That’s all for this episode of the How to Make Partner podcast. What’s your action for this week? Don’t just think about it. Actually do this:
Open your diary right now. Block out two hours this week to work on your career. Even if you don’t know exactly what you’ll do with that time yet, block it out. Because if you don’t protect the time now, it will get filled with something else.
If you have enjoyed this episode please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or give us a comment on Substack. This helps us get the word out to others who may need this advice too. Remember to hit subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s episode. Thanks for listening!
About Progress To Partner Academy: On-demand career help and guidance
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Links
Complete my FREE Partnership Readiness Assessment – to see where you have gaps in your own development – you’ll get a personalised report with actions for what progress your career forward
Connect with me on LinkedIn
Join Progress To Partner Academy and use the code PODCAST10 to get 10% off 12 months of premium annual membership.
Buy your hard copy of Poised for Partnership or buy the Ebook here
Buy your copy of How To Make Partner And Still Have A Life
Buy your copy of The Go To Expert
Buy your copy of The Financial Times Guide To Business Networking
Join my Progress To Partner Academy and access all my courses and use the code PODCASTBP10 to get 10% off 12 months of premium annual membership.
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