If you haven’t made the effort recently, now is the time for a career check-in. Being thoughtful about your career over the course of the year is important to make sure you’re setting and reaching appropriate milestones. July is an excellent time to check in because it’s the start of the fiscal year for many organizations. This means budgets, goals, and priorities reset and so should you. Here are three tips for jumpstarting your career this July.

Usually when you hear, “She got it from her mama” this refers to a certain set of “assets” but when I think about the things I got from my mama, they are way more meaningful than that. I attribute a large part of who I am and who I strive to be to witnessing my mother navigate life. I know it’s cliché but when I was growing up, my mother truly was my greatest role model.

I’m a daddy’s girl. As the oldest of seven, I never quite got enough attention as a child, but whenever I was around my father, I always saw the effort he made to make me feel extra special. It was never big gestures but a little wink here and silly face there, a tickle here and a snuggle there, that always made me feel like he had his eye on me. In our family, my mother was the disciplinarian; she was strict and wasn’t one for reasoning with me as a child, but my father was soft spoken, more easily persuaded, and poured into my inquisitive nature.

My path to becoming a licensed psychologist wasn’t one that I chose growing up, despite being the therapist among my friends. People came to me when they needed advice or a shoulder to cry on, but I had no idea that a psychologist was even a career option because I was taught, ‘what happens in our house, stays in our house.’ My decision may seem serendipitous to some, but I truly believe that I was a called to this field.