Chapter 1: What insights can help me step into 2026 with intention?
what's up everyone welcome back to the podcast this is the last episode of the year and it is a compilation episode filled with various different moments of 2025 with different insights and reminders to help you step into 2026 with intention and with clarity and presence
I have as an addition and a bonus gift for you all just because I love y'all and I want to say thank you for being in my life and for making what I do possible. I am linking down below my year in review template and also 2026 intention setting guide as well.
There are just a bunch of different questions with a Spotify music playlist that you can play as well and just reflect on the growth and the challenges and the relationships and all that came up this past year for you. and to set intentions for this next year. What are the seeds you want to water? What are you calling in?
And I think it's just a really incredible time of the year to slow down, to get clear, to change direction even one degree, and that has big effects down the road. So I hope you find that useful. Again, link in description for that.
Chapter 2: How can I reflect on my growth and challenges from 2025?
And that's it. I just want to say thank you guys. Thank you for making what I do possible. I am very excited about what we're cooking behind the scenes as the team is growing within Know Thyself to bring you in-person community experiences, more diverse conversations, increasing the quantity of the episodes as well as the quality. And yeah, that's all.
Thanks for coming along this ride and I will see you next year. I remember maybe it was about 10 years ago when I started doing past year reviews instead of New Year's resolutions. So looking back at the last year, every week of the calendar for peak sort of negative and positive experiences, positive and negative people, right?
The slight battery drains that seemed consistent over time, activities and people. And in addition to that, and I joked with a friend of mine at one point, I said, you know what I should create as a journal?
Chapter 3: What practices can support my intention-setting for the new year?
Because people love journals. Everybody's putting out a journal. I was like, let me just add to the noise. But my journal will be Something like worries that mostly didn't come true, where you just look back at the things that you were worried about.
And so I do this when I look back at the calendar and just what a tiny fraction of the whole, the smallest percentage that actually become a problem. And that gives you, I would say, two insights for me. And I need to constantly remind myself of this because I'm hypervigilant and actually tend to see the world as like full of danger, strangers you can't trust, et cetera. That's my baseline.
But one is a lot of the things you're really, really terrified about, worried about just don't happen, right?
Chapter 4: How do I identify and release limiting beliefs?
So in that case, the cards fall in your favor. But... real life has bumps along the way. So when the cards don't fall in your favor, you figure it out. And when you look backwards, you can see like, if you're actually sitting here, you have a decent life. You have figured out thousands upon thousands and maybe millions upon millions of little micro decisions and adaptations along the way.
So it's also doing a retrospective to convince myself, and this takes reconvincing, that you can figure it out. So I would say trusting in the ability, your own ability to figure most things out. And recover, even if something ends up being really terrible. Which happens.
Chapter 5: What role does community play in personal growth?
That's life. And I'm curious, in your year-in-review process, the more that you've done that, have you actually seen the needle moving forward of... not worrying about those things that are outside of your control, like you made progress. Yeah, much better. So that is a coachable skill or a learnable skill, depending on how you do it.
And I say coachable and learnable because I view those things as slightly different. Learnable is this self-improvement game, right? Yeah.
And there's a lot to the self-improvement game, but the social component, surrounding yourself with the right peer group, people who call you on your bullshit when you're blowing little things out of proportion, people who remind you of the silver lining when you're focused on the dark side of things, people who point to the past for evidence that you have figured something else out before, or to say, hey, you're about to make the same mistake.
So I really try to, I don't try, I calendar and invest in time with those people.
Chapter 6: How can I balance personal desires with a sense of service?
And that's arguably the most important thing that I do at the beginning of each year. But look, every day is the beginning of a new year. So you don't have to wait for January 1st. It's kind of an artificial constraint. You don't need to do that. But is looking forward to my calendar and basically once a quarter, let's just say, I have at least...
a long weekend going up to a week where i spend time with those people and you can read you can study you can meditate you can do all those things or you can just surround yourselves by the people who embody or naturally do things think things believe things that you want to absorb it tends to be i think a little bit easier yeah if you just steep yourself in it
There's kind of like a shallow level of approval that is easily transmitted and easily like visible to others. Right. You know, if you just think about like buying a fancy car or, you know, having like amazing photos on Instagram or whatever, like it's.
Chapter 7: What strategies can I use to cultivate a positive mindset?
it's like the cheap candy version of belongingness. And there's like almost no sustenance there, but it's very easy to make that appealing. Like it's very visible and obviously desirable on like a very superficial level. Whereas I think the deep meaningful sense of belongingness, that sense of like, I can be who I am, completely authentic, warts and all,
There's a certain level of discomfort and unpleasantness that is inherent in that that is not easily transmitted on Instagram or in a YouTube video. You can't really advertise it. There's no magazine ad in vogue saying 15 awkward conversations to... help you be yourself with your partner on a random Tuesday night. Like that's just, it's not a sexy promotion.
Like nobody's like clicking the buy button for that.
Chapter 8: How do I embrace impermanence and uncertainty in life?
In a way, like our needs get hijacked relatively easily by like the exposure, the amount that we're just purely exposed to. And I think there's a lot to be said of cutting a certain amount out of your life. I'm a big proponent of there's different names for it, but I call it a information diet or an attention diet. So like being very mindful and thoughtful of like,
what content and information you're consuming and being careful like the same way. I like the metaphor of a diet because I think it maps really well to kind of the information age that we live in. Like it's fine to have some of that content, you know, that like sexy social media content.
Like it's fine to have a little bit of that, just like it's fine to have, you know, a little bit of dessert here and there or like, you know, a candy bar every once in a while. But like if that is your primary diet day in and day out, then your mental health is going to deteriorate the same way if you just ate candy bars all day, every day, your physical health just like completely deteriorates.
So I think it's useful to think about like, what is like the, the,
vegetables of an information diet and making sure that you have like a strong sturdy portion of that in your life and then like anything that is candy for you like just being very conscious of how much of it you're consuming and when you're consuming it and like and put guardrails on yourself because ideally we would all have perfect self-control and we would like be able to manage our but it's not we're we're fucking animals dude like it's just
put guardrails on yourself, make certain things off limits, delete apps, block certain pages at certain times, leave your phone out of the bedroom. Like, you know, it's like all this like basic mental hygiene stuff. Yeah. That is, it's becoming commonplace, but it's becoming commonplace for a reason because it's just like, It's becoming like the nuts and bolts.
It's becoming like the brush your teeth and floss of the 21st century. It's just like, put your fucking phone away. Stop following accounts that make you feel bad. You only envy the life of people whose sacrifices you don't see. Yes. And... It's an alluring and persistent delusion, you know, to idealize people's lives that we see, whether it's through social media or in different spaces.
And it's one thing to have something that's admirable and have it be inspiring for you to take action in life. It's another thing to think that people didn't work and have to forego many things that you don't want to get there. Yeah, it's because nobody shows the sacrifices. Again, it's like... there's no Instagram account of like all the sacrifices in somebody's life.
Like nobody wants to share that with anybody. Nobody wants to see it, but it's, it is, it's inherent. And, and like anything that's good, it's whether it's, you know, developing a skill or being respected or being loved. Like it's, it's, I don't want to say you have to earn it. Cause I think that's like a bad model.
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