Make 2026 Your Best Year Yet With These New Year Glow Up Journal Prompts

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Ready for a real new year glow up that actually changes how you live, work and feel in 2026?

In this episode of The Remote CEO Life Podcast, I walk you through my personal new year glow-up reflection process and how I’m using it to intentionally shape my 2026 goals. I share how reviewing 2025 through the lens of mental health, energy, business and simplicity has completely changed how I approach growth, success and self-improvement.

You’ll learn:

• My exact year-in-review process and how to do your own new year glow-up reflection
• Why life is short and how that realisation should shape your 2026 goals
• How simplifying your business, finances and relationships leads to better results
• The importance of nervous system regulation when it comes to success and growth
• How to spot what drains your energy vs what fuels your motivation
• Why goal setting needs to work with your lifestyle, not against it
• How personal development and mental health directly impact entrepreneurship and financial freedom

If you want a calmer, more intentional 2026 new year glow up that supports your 2026 goals, mental health and lifestyle, this episode will help you reflect, reset and move forward with clarity - listen now to The Remote CEO Life Podcast.

#newyearglowup #2026goals #newyearplanning #selfimprovement #personaldevelopment #mentalhealth #financialfreedom #entrepreneurship

Transcript

2025 was an interesting year. And interesting doesn't necessarily mean that it was good or bad. It was just interesting. Compared to 2024 for me personally, 2025 was way easier. 2024 was a very difficult year for me, but 2025 has just thrown things at me that I could never ever have expected in so many different areas of my life. So today in this episode of the Remote CO Life podcast, I want to talk you through a little bit about how I've been analyzing my past year to give me fuel for 2026, what I have learned in 2025. And I'm not gonna give you a really long list. I've literally narrowed it down to three very, very easy things. And then I'm gonna guide you through how you can also reflect on your past year and how you can take those lessons into 2026. Because when you're an entrepreneur, when you're a business owner, The best way to look at things is that everything is a lesson. Every single thing that you go through in your life, in your business, in your career, in your relationships is teaching you something for the future. And that future might be something that you need to know tomorrow. It might be something you need to know next week. It could be something you need to know next year in five years time, whatever it is, everything is a lesson and we'll always come back around because life just works in cycles. So, I'm going to start by talking you through the process of what I did personally to analyze my year. And I actually did this about three or four weeks ago when I was taking some time off of my business because I was a little bit burnt out. So I took a little bit of a break, fully hard stop. And in that break, I still felt like I needed something to do, right? So I did my final year reflection and I call that 2025 or whatever year we're in, in review. And there's many different criteria's in that. but I essentially break it down into these core ones, which I've got a list of down here. So my personal life, my spiritual life, my business slash career slash finance life, my relationships and my health. And they're the key areas for me that are really important for me to analyze what was happening in this year throughout all of those areas. Because once I can analyze what was happening, I can look back and reflect and say, this was working, but this wasn't working. Or maybe there's some opportunity to grow here and there things that I can put in place for next year or next month, next week. We don't necessarily have to get to the end of the year to make changes in our life. I really don't like the mindset of new year, me. I think that that's a waste of time because we can constantly keep evolving. We can constantly start creating a new me. It doesn't have to be this set, oh, the 31st of December comes around tomorrow, I'll start. No, no. Today's the ninth of December, for example. Tomorrow I could start something new and that's also okay. So trying to get into the mindset of like, we're not having to restart everything next year. I understand why people do that. It's like a clean break and I definitely have goals like on a yearly calendar basis, but I also try and implement some of these things. Like I did this review, like I said, three or four weeks ago, I've already started implementing some of these things. I'm not necessarily waiting to 2025 to implement these lessons that I've learned, but I do think it is so important to reflect because reflection is the key to moving you forward. Hindsight is a wonderful, wonderful thing because it really gives you everything that you need to know to move forward. And this is something that I've been practicing my whole career, to be honest. When I was a fashion buyer, for working for Burberry, Ralph Lauren, Kate Spade. The way that I would plan my buys and how to spend money in the product that I was buying into was by looking back, looking back at what worked, what didn't work and doing something that we'd like to call a SWOT analysis, which is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats on all of the buys that I was doing and all of the sales that I was getting so that I could learn next time to invest my money smartly. invest my money in things that were actually going to work or opportunities, gaps in the market that I could have. And I'm so happy I learned that skill in my buying career because it is so relevant in everything that we do on a day-to-day basis. So what analysis doesn't have to be just for fashion, just for sales. It can be for your whole life. So I'm going to talk you through a little bit about how I reflected on my year, how I did my 2025 in review. And then you're going to be able to take that away and see if you want to implement that for yourself. And then I'm also going to share with you some of the lessons that came out personally for me in 2025 and that I am definitely going to be adopting going forward. That is tomorrow next week, next year, whenever I am going to be considering these lessons in everything that I do, because it is really important that we constantly are learning and growing and evolving from the things that we have already experienced. Our experience is our biggest, biggest school. Essentially, we're in the school of life now. If you're an adult, we're now in the school of life. We don't go to university anymore. We don't sit in a lecture room. We're learning as we go. And the more that we can adapt and take those lessons into our everyday life, the easier our life is going to be. So what did I look at then in my 2025 in review? So the first thing I did, I always do a meditation firstly, when I go into to analysing any situation, I always try and make sure that I'm in a really calm environment. My nervous system is feeling really grounded because otherwise we can write things or think about things from a place of emotion. So we want to be in a really neutral mindset. So I would highly encourage you don't do this on a day where you're feeling really stressed and you want to just cram in that yearly review. I would recommend that you find a time when you're feeling pretty, pretty good, pretty okay, pretty neutral. And then you're going to reflect from a really neutral place, which is going to guide you in the better way than it would be if you were making. reviews or guidance or taking lessons from an emotional place. So the first thing that we're gonna look at is how did this year feel for you? How did you feel coming into the year? How did you feel in January, February, March, April and so on? And how do you feel now at the end of the year now that we're in December? What crazy events happened in this year? And something that I like to do is before I start this year of review, I actually just map out month by month all of the things that happened in that year, good, bad, ugly, all of the things, just the key events that I can remember off the of my head. And better if you do this throughout the year, to be honest, I forget, but I've got quite a good memory. So when it comes to December, I literally just like put a folder in my notion file and put January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December. and wrote down some of the key events that happened to me month to month. Because when you reflect on the things that have actually happened, you're then going to understand how they made you feel. So I know that can be really confronting. If you had some challenges this year, particularly if it was in your personal life or in your business, that can feel really hard to go back and reflect on. But it's really important that you do reflect on it. It's really important you recognize how those events made you feel. Because if they made you feel bad, we want to do less of them next year. And if it made you feel good, We want to do more of that next year, right? So what we want to do is understand how did all of the occurrences of this year make us feel and how are we feeling going into next year at the end of this year? How are we feeling after we've just completed a 12-month cycle? The next thing that I want to look at is the intentions that I set at the beginning of the year or last quarter. However you set your goals, the last time you set them, the last time you checked in with them, Check in with all of the intentions, all of the goals that you had and look at what you have achieved. This is really important because it's so easy for us to get sucked into the day-to-day life and forget about all of the things that we have actually achieved. Whereas if we can go back and look at these were the things that I set out to do and I've ticked off 50 % of those things. How cool is that? Like that you have ticked off 50 % of your goals of your intentions list. That is an amazing achievement and that is an achievement to be celebrated. We forget to celebrate our achievements so much because we're so focused on just doing the everyday things. We get sucked into the mundane life tasks that we don't often celebrate our achievements. And it is really important to celebrate our achievements because that is what is going to give us motivation and fuel to move forward. So have a look and check in with the intentions or goals that you set the last time that you set them and look at what has been achieved. in that timeframe because it is going to be really eye opening for you. If you haven't achieved the things that you set out to do, that's okay. Life happens, things change. And you might find that you look back at that intentions or goals that you set and they're not relevant to you anymore. So in which case you wouldn't have wanted to achieve them anyway. So it's time to just check in with that and see if the goals are still relevant, then they stay on the list. That's okay. It's just time. They're gonna come eventually. But we are just wanting to make sure that we are moving the things that we want forward and discontinue in anything that we don't want. The other things that I was looking at were the biggest lessons of 2025. So what did I learn in my personal life, my business life, my finances, the relationships that I had and any health things that happened. And I categorize it by that because obviously there's so many different aspects of our life. We don't just work. We don't just have a partner, we don't just have a family, we don't just focus on our wellbeing, we have so many different aspects of life, but what you will find is if one was slightly off, then the others probably had a knock on effect. So it's really important to look at what was the lesson. If you had a really bad period of struggle financially, for example, what did you learn from that? Did you learn that you have to track your finances better because then you wouldn't have got yourself into a sticky situation? Did you learn in your business that you stopped marketing, in which case leads stop coming in, in which case you know that the marketing needed improvement? Did you have a continuous argument with your partner and that's a fundamental problem for you that you need to address? Did you have ongoing health problems in a certain area of your body that maybe it's time to go and get checked? What are the things, what are the lessons that you've learned? How are you going to reflect on those lessons? Are you going to look at them positively? Are you going to look at them negatively? Ideally, you look at them from a neutral place and you just say, right, okay, this happened. We're just stating the facts. This happened. This is maybe why this happened. And then this is what I have learned from this situation. Not everything has to have a lesson, but if you can see patterns or things that repeat in your life that keep coming back around, I highly recommend that you look back. the lesson of what that's trying to teach you because it will help you make better decisions going forward. The next things that I looked at were things that blocked my success or blocked my progress and things that drained my energy. Now I want to look at this because I don't want to keep doing things or have relationships with people or have things in my life that sucking my energy. Why would I want that for myself? Now it's so easy for us to get sucked into staying in a situation because it's comfortable, because that's all we know. If it is not making us feel good, why do we keep doing it? Now a big example for me this year for that was one of the things that I was doing in my business, which was constantly churning out new content. And this sucked the life out of me. I really struggled to keep up with the content hamster will. And not so much written content, but more so video and graphic content. So I made a really conscious decision about a third of the way through this year to say my Instagram is, and my TikTok are my lowest priority marketing channels. And that is controversial because so many people use it as their highest marketing channels, right? For me, I do not naturally... make video content. This situation is fine because I'm sitting here talking to you. But when it comes to making aesthetically pleasing videos and telling stories on Instagram, that is not my forte. What is my forte is speaking like this, hence why I have a podcast. And also writing. I'm a very, very good writer. So I focused on platforms where my natural strengths, my natural abilities were able to flourish. And I was able to really excel in those areas. So my LinkedIn, to be honest, has popped off this year. I've gained over 4,000 followers just in the past like three or four months. So I know that what the effort that I'm putting in is being rewarded now because I'm in my natural flow state. And this is why I actually teach this approach now because I can see that when you're in a natural flow state of things that are easy for you, the things that you love doing, the things that you know get you results, business is easy. things flow to you, you don't have to force. So in my program, such as the Freedom Model Method Foundations, which is a course that teaches you how to set up an online business, from the early days in your business, I am teaching you how to set up a business that works with your energy, works with your passions, works with your natural strengths, works with the lifestyle that you want to live so that it doesn't feel like a constant battle. Too many people teach hustle culture approaches and tell you to fit into a one size fits all box and our businesses. and our energy does not fit into a one size fits all box. So you have to be really conscious about the things that block your energy because they are sucking the life out of you. And if you are sucked in one area of your life, it will transfer into others. So if there is something in your business, in your life that is sucking the life out of you this year right now, highly recommend looking at why that is. If there's something you can fix to change it and make that give you energy again, amazing. If you are keeping to battle against this same thing over and over and over and over and over again, I recommend that you make some changes. I can't tell you what those changes look like without knowing your personal situation, but if something is draining you, if something is blocking your energy, if something is blocking your success, get really honest about that and start making changes because if nothing changes, nothing changes. The next thing we're looking at is what gave us energy. So in contrast, Who were the people that lit us up? What were the tasks that we love to do that made us feel good? What were all of the things that gave us energy this year? And this is so, so important to reflect on because we want to be doing more of this. If these were things that gave us energy and worked really well, we want to continue that momentum. We want more of that good energy in 2026 and make sure you understand what amazing things were giving you energy this year. In the same breath, what worked well? What was... catapulting you forward this year, what was giving you slow but steady growth? Make sure you document those things, because again, we want to keep doing more of what works and less of what didn't. Why are we still battling and trying to force a round peg into a square hole when it's clearly not working? Let's just focus on the things that do work, or least 80 % of our attention on the things that do work, right? And the things that give us energy, because then we've got so much more energy for the 20 % that might not be doing so well. and we'll be able to manage those tasks in a better way because we're so fulfilled, we're so energized by the 80 % that is working really well for us. And then going back and looking at all of those things that you've just written, you want to look at opportunities and what opportunities do you have to improve, to grow, change going forward into the new year. That is the process that I personally use to do my 2025 year in review. Feel free to take it, feel free to adapt it. There's a few bits more in my review because I also like to look at it from a more spiritual place. I also pull some tarot cards. I'll also do some more meditations around that and goal setting. But those opportunities are essentially going to fuel the things that you set your goals on next year. So off the back of that, highly recommend you set some more intentions, but don't necessarily need to put a timeline on it. You don't need to say, have to do this in 2026. Like I say, this should be a constant evolving thing. You could check in on this every week. You could check in on this every month. You could check in once every year, whatever works for you. But it's really important that we have intentions, that we have something to work towards, because then we can look back, reflect, and see what is working, what's not, and what opportunities we can do to drive ourselves forward. Now, off the back of that, all of the things that I personally learned, there were three key themes for me that came up across everything that I did in all of those areas that I've mentioned. The first lesson was a pretty tough one to swallow, be honest, but this one was very prevalent for me at the end of the year, where to be honest, I had to face a lot of life or death situations, not for myself personally, but for other people. Some people that I know passed away, other people that I know, someone, a very close family member to me actually had a very difficult healthcare situation and it just... All of it happened in a really short space of time. So unfortunately I was faced with the promise of death at some point in life in a really small bubble. And that was quite overwhelming because I've never really had to face that before, luckily. But what it did remind me and what the lesson out of that was is life is short. Going back to what I've just said, why are we focusing on the things that suck our energy? Why are we not doing more of the things that light us up and give us energy? Because life's too short to focus on the negative, to focus on the things that don't work for us. Focus on the good and it's just gonna be such a nicer ride. Life is gonna be so much better. So thinking about that life is short, what do you wanna do with your life? Like I build my business around the lifestyle that I wanna live and now I teach other people to build a business around the lifestyle that they want to live. Because life is too short to be sucking energy, to be doing things we don't wanna do, to be living a life that we don't wanna live. Build your business. or build your life around the life that you want to live because it is too short. Imagine if you were in, let's say you're 97 years old, you know you haven't got much long left. Would you be looking back at your life right now, feeling really happy about all the things that you've achieved, all the things you've accomplished, or are there still things on your list that you want to achieve? Now, I encourage you to try. with all your might and will to do those things. It doesn't need to be tomorrow, but you know, life is short. So constantly keep planning things to add things in, try something new, meet a new person, tick off something else that's on your to-do list. you could do anything in life, what would you do and look at that, how you can implement that in your life. And if that requires like a whole lifestyle change, if you wanna start a business because you wanna quit your nine to five, I have an actual online course that is going to teach you how to do that, so I'll pop the links to that in the show notes, because life is too short to stay focused on things that we don't want to do or look back with regret. The second thing that I want to touch on that was a lesson for me this year is that simple and simplifying everything is going to be so much more effective and that comes in everything that comes in friendships, that comes in... ⁓ business that comes in your finances, like just having a really simple way of working, get good at one, one thing and then move on to the next thing. Just simplifying everything, everything in your life is so much more effective because once you are surrounded by chaos, you're trying to do all the things and you're trying to be everywhere all the time. My goodness, that is so exhausting. And it brings me onto my third lesson, which is your nervous system needs space to hold and receive success. If you're overwhelmed and you are trying to do all the things, trying to be everywhere, like I said, in that chaos mode, not in simplicity, it's exhausting. You're constantly depleted. You're constantly on the edge of burnout and your nervous system is going to be wrecked. Now I can talk about this because this has happened to me and I have spent the past few years, to be honest, in a bit of chaos mode and not, I was a functioning chaotic person. However, My nervous system has really paid for that this year and I've had to take quite a lot of a step back and really make sure that I am resting just as much as I am working, make sure that my life is fully balanced. Because if I'm not balanced, if my cup is like 90 % full and I've only got 10 % to receive, I'm never gonna be able to receive the goals that I've got because I'm never gonna have the capacity to get there. So you have to allow yourself some space, some time and space, you have to free up some time and space. to allow those goals to land, to allow yourself to receive more. And you only are able to do that if you've got a calm nervous system. Now I've got my own practices that allow me to calm my nervous system. I highly encourage you to find practices that help you. And when I say nervous system, I mean your internal feeling of calm, essentially, to put it into basic terms, that has to feel neutral or calm on a daily basis for you to be able to have the capacity to do all the things that you wanna do. And those three things in conjunction for me are the rules of how I live my life. They're also the rules of how I work in my business, how I teach other people to build a business because I want people to recognize that life is short and do all the things that they want to do. I want people to build a really simple but effective business, but it doesn't overwhelm them. And I want them to understand that their nervous system has to be calm enough for them to be able to receive all the amazing success that they want. If you are interested in building a business that works better for your lifestyle, I will pop the links in the show notes to my online course, to my free masterclass, to my online resources that are going to help you get closer to that. I'll also pop all of those journal prompts in the show notes as well, in case you want to take action to reflect on your own 2025. This is going to be my last episode of 2025. I'm so happy that you have stuck with me all of this year. I've got some bigger and better things coming for the Remote CO Life podcast in 2026. I'm super, super excited about. It will be incorporated in all of those lessons. And yeah, I'm just really grateful that you've tuned in this year and I am going to see you very soon in 2026.