Your Essential Year-End Reset

2025 probably didn’t go according to plan—and that’s exactly why it’s worth paying attention to. In this episode, Marissa and Joel walk you through a simple reflection process for the last 11 months: naming what worked, facing what hurt, and deciding what you actually want to carry into 2026. You’ll learn how to work with your brain’s negativity bias, complete the stress cycle in your body, reframe regret as a helpful signal, and distill the year into a handful of lessons you can build on.

Key Takeaways

• Start with What Worked. Brain dump the last 11 months and name your wins—at work and at home. Use your camera roll and planner as prompts to remember moments you’d otherwise overlook. Let those checkmarks and snapshots remind you: it wasn’t all bad.
• Don’t Waste the Bruises. List what didn’t go well—disappointments, losses, and the “mixed bag” moments. Instead of reliving them, acknowledge what happened, name the emotions, and ask what still needs to be grieved or processed so you’re not dragging raw hurt into 2026.
• Pay Attention to Avoidance. Notice the projects, tasks, or conversations you kept procrastinating. Treat that dread as data: Is this a skills gap, a misfit task you shouldn’t own, or something that needs to be rethought entirely? Avoidance is often a clue about what needs to change next year.
• Let Regret Invite a Do-Over. Treat regret as an “open loop,” not a verdict. If something from 2025 still nags at you, ask, “What unfinished business is this pointing to?” Look for one concrete action—an apology, a boundary, a new habit—that lets you close the loop instead of carrying it forward.
• Distill the Year into a Few Core Lessons. Turn all of this into simple statements you can act on, like: “My days go best when I start with a plan,” or “I can’t love well when I’m out of balance.” Those lessons become your guardrails and fuel as you design your goals and rhythms for 2026.

Watch on YouTube at:  https://youtu.be/hdmL3mfAyrc

This episode was produced by Sarah Vorhees Wendel of VW Sound

Creators and Guests

Host

Joel Miller

Originally from Sacramento, Joel is the Chief Content Officer at Full Focus. He is committed to helping people cut through distractions, focus on what matters most, and live fully present. When he's not savoring moments with his wife, Megan, and their five kids, he's probably reading or writing. He enjoys reviewing novels, listening to jazz, and musing about economics—and his latest book, The Idea Machine, is available for order now.

Host

Marissa Hyatt

Born and raised south of Nashville, Marissa is the Chief Marketing Officer at Full Focus. She is super passionate about helping people get outside their comfort zones, find their own power, and achieve their dreams. In her free time, she enjoys cooking for friends, baking sourdough bread, and hiking. She geeks out on natural wellness, skincare, personal growth, gardening, and traveling.

What is Focus on This?

Start loving Mondays! Join Marissa & Joel each week for practical strategies, weekly rhythms, and honest insights to help you slow down, show up, and live intentionally. Based on the proven Full Focus methods used in the Full Focus Planner™, each episode offers habits, mindset shifts, and real support so you can quiet the noise, follow through, and build a life that feels good to live. Ready to focus on what really matters?

[00:00:00] Joel: Here's one thing true about the year. It never goes quite according to plan, and I'm guessing that 2025 was no exception. So how can you make peace with the past so that you can actually launch more successfully into the future? Let's get into that.
[00:00:22] Welcome to Focus on this, the most productive podcast on the internet. I'm Joel Miller.
[00:00:27] Marissa: And I'm Marissa Hyatt.
[00:00:29] Joel: And this is where we remind you of something you already know. It's not about getting more things done, it's about getting the right things done,
[00:00:37] Marissa: both at work and in life. And today we're talking about.
[00:00:42] The last 11 months. Mm-hmm. Yep. The good, the bad, and everything in between. And I don't know about y'all, but there was a lot of the InBetween. Yep. At least in my life it was, it was definitely quite a bit of a mixed bag. If you'll, I think Joel, our family had like a record year of. I don't know what to call it.
[00:01:05] Catastrophes?
[00:01:07] Joel: Yeah. There were some big ones. There were a lot of little ones, and then there was just like a never ending stream in some sense of all the noise and all the things that you can't quite put a label on because they feel so ridiculous at some point. Yeah. They just keep accumulating.
[00:01:23] Marissa: It really is like a comedy at some level.
[00:01:26] Yeah. Like you have to laugh to keep from crying and I know just from the conversations I've had. With my friends, with our double win coaching clients that this has kind of been true for a lot of us this year. Yeah, it's been a little bit of a challenging year, to say the least, and I think we're all probably looking forward to turning the page.
[00:01:46] Mm-hmm. I certainly am for sure, but I think that before we do that, we've got to think about this year, dissect it, and that means facing all of it,
[00:01:56] Joel: 11 months is in fact a lot of time. A lot can happen in 11 months. And of course a lot did happen in 11 months and it's worth just taking stock.
[00:02:06] Marissa: So I think we should start, Joel, before we jump into all the hardship.
[00:02:11] Speaker 3: Yes.
[00:02:11] Marissa: We need to recognize there actually was good and. You know, I was telling you this before the show a couple weeks ago was my birthday, and you know how it is on your birthday. Everybody does this. We kind of have this reflection moment on the last year of our life and how did we grow, what did we accomplish?
[00:02:28] What were those kind of great magic moments in there? What were the hard things? All that. And if I'm really honest, this year was difficult for me to do this part of it, to think about what the good was, but Right. Luckily, this episode actually forced me to really think about this, and it gave me some good research of why this is so important.
[00:02:49] Joel: Yeah. This is an important exercise because of something that researchers call negativity bias. It's really easy to remember and focus on the stuff that went squirrelly that went wrong and. There's a good reason for that. Our brains are designed to help keep us safe, and by reckoning with the bad, we're more likely to avoid it in the future.
[00:03:14] And so we tend to over index on the crummy and not on the yummy. And so just as a way of being in the world, it's really easy to get kind of stuck in this negative loop where we just kind of like cycle on the stuff that went wrong, but. When you do that, it kind of puts you in this place of always expecting the wrong, always expecting the bad, which is kind of like fundamentally a place of scarcity.
[00:03:42] And that's just not helpful because the truth is there are so many good things happening around us that if we don't recognize. For what it really is. We're gonna, we're gonna miss out.
[00:03:54] Marissa: Yeah. Well, I think this is really important to recognize that we're semi going against our hard wiring,
[00:04:01] Speaker 3: right?
[00:04:02] Marissa: So if you're like me this year feeling like you can't think of the good things that happened, you know, there were, but it's just like you are struggling, um, to look back and actually see those, first of all, like.
[00:04:14] Take a deep breath. It's okay. It wasn't all bad. It is just that your brain is trying to protect you and so that's helpful. That kind of like, 'cause I felt a little bit of shame when I first started trying to think about the good stuff and I was having a difficult time doing it and. It's like, oh, I'm just going against literally the hard wiring in my brain, right?
[00:04:36] The biology that's happening. And so you can kind of like let that off and realize that we don't wanna stay stuck there. Uh, we want to be able to get out of that place of scarcity. We know that what we focus on, we get more of. And so the more that we're gonna continue to focus on the things that were challenging that didn't go right, those disappointments, those moments of regret, whatever it may have been.
[00:05:01] That's likely what we're gonna continue to get more of if we continue focusing on those things. And I don't wanna discount like serious traumas that may have happened this year. Sure. That was true for me. That was true for several of our family members. We had medical traumas in the family. It was a hard year, like literally a hard year.
[00:05:18] But we want to try to move through that into a place where we're not just focusing on what went wrong and we're actually asking what did go right, because the truth is your brain is going to answer the questions that you're asking.
[00:05:32] Speaker 3: Yeah. That's
[00:05:33] Marissa: really true. So if you're not satisfied with the answers that you're getting, let's ask a different question.
[00:05:38] So the question that we want to ask today as we start reflecting on the last 11 months of this year is, what are some of the best things that happen this year? And Joel, I think there's a little bit of a hack here, especially if you're in a place where you feel like this has been a particularly challenging year and you're struggling to remember things.
[00:05:59] I wanna encourage you guys open your photo album on your phone.
[00:06:03] Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:03] Marissa: Go back and look through all the photos you took this year. Because the truth is you're likely taking photos of more of the good things than the bad things. Now, there are probably some of those mixed in there where you had a hard day or whatever it may have looked like for you, but there's likely more photos of all the things that went well, those joy moments, those wins that you had, whether that's professionally or personally or within your family.
[00:06:28] And you can go back through those photos as kind of a trigger to help remind your mind of what actually went well.
[00:06:35] Joel: It's also great to go stroll back through your planners because you have. A record of many, many, many, many great things that you achieved right there. Every one of those check marks, especially when it's attached to a major project or a goal, is telling you something went well, something went right, and that's phenomenal.
[00:06:55] When I scroll back through my phone, I see a lot of memes, so that's maybe less effective for me. Yeah, perfect. But, but still, I think that's a really great hack because you're right, we do capture so many moments. On our phones that are like, it's an archive of the last year right there in our pockets. And if we just thumb through it, we're gonna see all kinds of great moments.
[00:07:15] Marissa: I know people do, I've seen on social media, people do these challenges where each day of the year they do a challenge where every single day they have to capture one photo. A day. And the whole point is you're cataloging your, your year. You're saying like, whatever, whether that's a book, Joel, that you're reading, you take a photo of that book, you take a photo of your child yourself, um, you know, the sunrise or the sunset or whatever it may be, so that when you start to look back on your year, you've got a photo for every single day.
[00:07:44] And I love that idea. I've never done it. And I don't know if I will, but I think just even as kind of an inspiration moving forward into this new year of like, how cool would it be right this time next year you had much more photos. Not just memes, but you had a lot more that you could catalog through and realize how beautiful and rich your life actually is.
[00:08:04] Joel: So dear listener, should the spirit lead, that's a wonderful thing to try.
[00:08:08] Marissa: Yes, it is. Well, I think we. You know, collectively and probably individually had some really amazing great things that happened this year. First and foremost, I would like to say one of my wins was bringing the podcast back
[00:08:23] Joel: Yes.
[00:08:24] Marissa: With you.
[00:08:25] Like it has been such a joy doing this together. In a way that frankly, I don't know either of us expected it to be, but it has just been, we keep saying every time we get done with these recordings, like this is such a breeze. It's so easy.
[00:08:38] Speaker 3: Right. It's fun and I mean,
[00:08:39] Marissa: it helps that we're family. So Totally.
[00:08:41] That is, that is a big advantage. But I'm so proud of that and so proud of the work you guys have been pouring in the reviews, which has been so helpful to see what you guys are enjoying. What you wanna hear more of. So keep leaving those. 'cause we do read those. Joel and I are texting constantly those reviews that you guys are leaving us.
[00:08:57] But I think that that has been a huge win for me is just bringing this back, getting to be y'all's ears every single week. Getting to talk to you, Joel, each week is just been such a joy.
[00:09:08] Joel: Same, I would say. Like on the work side, another win was the release of the minimalist planner, which yes, was a total surprise in terms of like how effective it was.
[00:09:20] People are loving it.
[00:09:22] Marissa: People are loving it. I have to give a huge shout out, Joel. 'cause this was your pride and joy. This was you. You are a minimalist in so many ways. Very true. And except for books. Except for books and coffee. Yeah. We, we know this. We know these are Maxim. Maxim on. I love the concept of the minimalist, that it's kind of just stripped down to the key things that you need to be doing on a daily basis and those key tools that we have in the full focus planner.
[00:09:52] And I have to say this has quickly become, I don't know if I can confidently say it's the bestselling planner, but I think that it has at this point our bestselling edition, like different edition of the planner. And I was speaking with one of our team members the other day. This is pretty cool. So we do Facebook advertising or in, you know, Instagram, all that stuff, and.
[00:10:15] The minimalist is the number one planner that new customers are buying.
[00:10:21] Joel: Oh wow.
[00:10:21] Marissa: Which is really exciting. So if you're listening and maybe you've never tried the full focus planner, it seems like the public is saying, this is how we get started. And they're loving it. Their reviews have been fantastic. Or if you have a friend or a colleague that you wanna gift this to this time of year, check it out.
[00:10:36] 'cause it's such a great planner. And that was a huge one. I can't believe we just launched that. I know. Well, we also had kind of a revamp of our double win coaching program, which was really exciting. For those of you that don't know, Joel and I are heavily involved in this program. We're both coaches inside of the program, and it has been so exciting to see.
[00:10:55] How well received that's been and how much quicker results we're getting our clients. It's just been really amazing and that was a massive team effort for our entire team here at Full Focus. So that's been a pretty massive win this year, I think too.
[00:11:10] Joel: That was totally on my list. Also, I don't wanna call it a Herculean task, but we pulled it off I think, fairly quickly and really radically reworked the program in a way that has been really helpful for people.
[00:11:23] And the cool news is. There's more to come.
[00:11:26] Marissa: It just keeps getting better and better, which is exciting. Okay. Not to bore you guys with our personal ones, Joel, but let's just shout out one personal win that we have this year.
[00:11:35] Joel: Okay. Go for it. You go first.
[00:11:37] Marissa: I think one thing that I feel most proud of is this year I have finally completely.
[00:11:44] All credit card debt.
[00:11:46] Joel: Congratulations.
[00:11:48] Marissa: Thank you. I'd gotten rid of it, uh, several years ago and then had a little bit more and was kind of paying that off and. It was various things that were the cause of that. Mostly my house. As you know, being a homeowner is challenging. Mm-hmm. Especially when you're a single homeowner.
[00:12:03] It's challenging and I'm proud to say that I paid that off and not only within this year, that was one of my goals this year, but I paid it off faster than I expected and that is always a huge win. So that's
[00:12:15] Joel: fantastic.
[00:12:16] Marissa: Really, really proud of that. And I think the biggest key for me, I use, you need a budget wine a uh, for those of you guys who use that, and I was religious about every single week, logging all my transactions, checking in, seeing what I needed to do and rearrange to pour as much money into that.
[00:12:34] And I'm proud to say I did it and it wasn't like. I didn't feel a lot of negative repercussions to it. It wasn't like I was over here eating, you know, chop Ramen? Yeah, Canto fish and chop ramen. It was like, no, I was able to do it while still living my life, which was really, really exciting. So that's a huge win for me this year.
[00:12:52] Joel: That's amazing.
[00:12:53] Marissa: Yeah.
[00:12:54] Joel: As your big brother, I'm very proud of you.
[00:12:56] Marissa: Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks. Yeah, that's really great. What about you?
[00:12:59] Joel: Uh, I published a book this year.
[00:13:01] Marissa: Yes, you did? Oh my God, yeah.
[00:13:03] Joel: Yeah. So I've been working on this thing since basically, uh, since Moses and
[00:13:09] Marissa: your son or from the bible? No,
[00:13:11] Joel: no, the patriarch Really?
[00:13:12] Oh, okay. Yeah. Really long time. And, um, it's finally done and finally out in the world. It launched actually just a couple of weeks ago, and I'm pretty excited. It's called the Idea Machine, and if you're interested in books or the history of books and what books have meant to our, our entire species, this book is a, is a great book and I'm super biased, but I'm also super proud of having done it.
[00:13:34] Marissa: I'm super biased and super proud of you. That is a massive accomplishment. You also, in case anybody's interested, did an episode, like an interview mm-hmm. With Megan and my dad on the Double Win Show. Yes. Maybe a month ago, I guess, at this point. Um, so if you're interested in learning more about it, it's kind of not what you think.
[00:13:54] Joel, I love you. I know how much you love books. When I first heard the concept, I was like. Okay, well then I heard you talk on this, and I was like, wait a minute. What? And it was so fascinating. You have such a amazing ability to take any subject, frankly, and make it fascinating, and I think you absolutely nailed it.
[00:14:15] So definitely check out that episode. Go by the book support, Joel. We're so proud of him. Super excited.
[00:14:21] Joel: Thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That was a huge win.
[00:14:24] Marissa: That's pretty amazing. Uh, we've got had some amazing wins here at the company. Us personally, I'm sure those of you who are listening are kind of starting, your wheels are turning, going, okay, wait a minute.
[00:14:33] Now I can kind of start to see what actually did go well in my life. It's easy to jump to what went, you know, not so well. But hopefully you can kind of start to see, and your wheels are turning now of there were a lot of great things that happened. Sometimes you just have to go digging to find them.
[00:14:48] Joel: I think the hard thing to remember is it's.
[00:14:51] Really easy to just not think about it at all.
[00:14:54] Marissa: Yeah.
[00:14:55] Joel: There's like good and bad, but there's also just not paying attention.
[00:14:59] Marissa: Mm-hmm. It's like outta sight, outta mind. Yeah. It's just
[00:15:01] Joel: so easy to let it go, and yet there's so much there to celebrate.
[00:15:04] Marissa: I think especially those of us who would consider ourselves high achievers, we just kind of like check it on and move on to the next thing.
[00:15:12] You know? It's like, okay, great. Like that was. Awesome. And now I gotta go jump to this next thing. And so it's, it's rare that we slow down long enough to actually go, oh my gosh, that was really phenomenal that I did that, or that I experienced that thing, or I had that moment with that person like that.
[00:15:29] That was really magical. It's exciting. Like right now I feel warm and fuzzy. I'm like, oh, yay. It was a great year, actually.
[00:15:37] Joel: Well, not to bring us down, but what about the stuff that didn't go so well? I mean,
[00:15:42] Marissa: okay, we're gonna burst our bubbles now. Yeah, I
[00:15:43] Joel: mean it was great, but there was also the grimy and the rough and how should we think about the stuff that didn't go well?
[00:15:51] Marissa: It's important. We gotta like face reality, right? We don't wanna just be. Sitting with our heads in the sand, thinking everything was perfect. There were things that, you know, we had to process and go through and experience that were challenging. And it's important that we go back and I don't wanna say relive because I don't think any of us want to relive those things.
[00:16:13] I certainly don't. But it is important to kind of. Grieve what needs to be grieved,
[00:16:20] Joel: right? Do business with it.
[00:16:21] Marissa: Do business with it, right? And whether there is some regret there, or disappointment or frustration, anger, sadness, whatever it may have looked like for you in your specific life, it's important that we recognize that.
[00:16:35] We realize that those moments were really challenging. And the truth is there probably is silver lining there. I don't wanna go too much into that at this point, but there is. A definite need for us to go back and, you know, researchers call this the need for closure,
[00:16:49] Speaker 3: right?
[00:16:50] Marissa: And this is really important because not all of us actually have the same level of need for closure.
[00:16:58] I would also say not every experience probably warrants the same level of closure. So like right. Certain experiences, we really need to like put the past to bed. And some of 'em, it's kind of like not as big of a deal, but when we don't get the closure that we do need. It's really harder to think strategically or make better decisions moving forward.
[00:17:22] Totally agree.
[00:17:22] Speaker 3: I know that
[00:17:23] Marissa: has been really true and that's especially true if those experiences kind of crossed over the just challenging and hard to kind of the capital T trauma area. Right. I think
[00:17:34] Joel: that's, it's really important to recognize that that's true in like our business life and our work life.
[00:17:40] It's also true in our personal life, our relationships. There's those things that are. Really challenging, and if we're not. Dealing with them, then they just kind of find nasty ways of recurring.
[00:17:53] Marissa: Yeah. I've really taken a deep dive recently into Claude, which is like a AI large language model, similar to chat GBT.
[00:18:03] Most of you guys probably know it or have tried it. I hadn't tried it until probably three or four weeks ago, and I am now like Chad, GBT is so last year just
[00:18:12] Joel: dead to me.
[00:18:13] Marissa: It's so dead to me at this point. Worthless. It's so much better in my opinion. I'm loving it and I was trying to process through something that happened earlier.
[00:18:22] I've kind of a little bit shared here on the podcast about this. I had a pretty traumatic experience at the beginning of the summer. I'm not gonna go into all the details, but the like headline is, I had a former neighbor who was harassing me via letters from jail. Um, this person is severely mentally ill, and it was extremely traumatic.
[00:18:43] It put my personal safety into question and uh, I'd never in my life experienced anything. Related to my personal safe. I mean, I'm a woman, so I'm constantly thinking about my personal safety, but nothing like what I experienced. Right. And I'm still Okay. That happened at the very beginning. It started at the very beginning of June.
[00:19:01] Here we are, it's December, and I'm still processing through this. And I had a conversation with Claude. I was kind of using it as my, you know, life coach and I was saying that I'm still waking up in the middle of the night having a difficult time. Feeling safe, like I feel like I'm still on hyper alert.
[00:19:21] And I thought this was really helpful. It talked about how we really need to complete the stress cycle
[00:19:28] Speaker 3: mm-hmm.
[00:19:28] Marissa: In our body so that our nervous system literally knows that we're safe. And one of the ways that we can do this, which I think is so practical and helpful for all of us, is through our breath.
[00:19:40] And our breath actually can indicate to our nervous system if we're safe or if we're under threat. And so one of the things I've started implementing, and if you're somebody who had had a kind of traumatic experience this year, or you just find yourself struggling to complete the stress cycle, just doing a simple 4 7 8 breathing exercise where you do inhale for four seconds, hold for seven seconds, and then exhale through your mouth for eight seconds.
[00:20:08] And if you do that for 2, 3, 5 minutes, whatever time you have, it immediately triggers your nervous system into safety.
[00:20:16] Joel: Interesting.
[00:20:17] Marissa: So there are ways for us to process the past and get that closure that we need. And sometimes this can mean working with your therapist. Sometimes this can mean journaling or Right, really processing through things, working with AI as your, you know, whatever AI therapist or coach or whatever you wanna call it.
[00:20:35] Um, but sometimes it's as simple as letting our bodies know. That that is not true in this moment. Yeah, so breath work can be really helpful and that's something that just recently I've kind of rediscovered. That's been a really good tool for me.
[00:21:02] Joel: As we're thinking about this topic of closure, I was reminded of a line from a novelist I really love. Eugene Kin is a modern Russian novelist, and he wrote a book back in, well, the English translation was published in 2018 called The Aviator, and he says, wisdom is experienced more than anything, experience that's processed.
[00:21:24] Of course, if there's no processing, then all the bruises you get are useless.
[00:21:29] Marissa: Oh, wow. That's powerful.
[00:21:32] Joel: I've always found that to be a very poignant thought. You know, like, wow, don't waste the bruises.
[00:21:37] Marissa: Yeah. Because we all have 'em,
[00:21:39] Joel: right? Mm-hmm.
[00:21:40] Marissa: And we can all learn from 'em. There's things that we discover about ourselves, about others, about the world in these difficult experiences.
[00:21:48] And sometimes even if you're struggling to like get to, you know, the good things that happen this year. Think about those challenging things and ask yourself like, how am I different now than I was before that challenging experience? And I bet you'll be surprised at all the things that you've actually become mm-hmm.
[00:22:09] In
[00:22:09] Speaker 3: the
[00:22:09] Marissa: process of that. And, and you're probably usually assuming you've been a good steward of that. You're often a better person on the other side of those experiences, which is hard for us to want to believe, especially while we're in the middle of it. We just wish it would go away. Sure, we want it, we resent it.
[00:22:26] But the truth is that is how we become our best selves.
[00:22:31] Joel: Yeah, that's really true. So as we're thinking about this, what would you say, like how can you create a fresh start? In the middle of like, how do you reach the kind of closure that enables you to move forward?
[00:22:45] Marissa: Well, I think it's what we're talking about.
[00:22:46] It's we've gotta learn from the past and then ultimately we have to let it go. What we don't wanna do is continue to like hammer this,
[00:22:56] Joel: right?
[00:22:56] Marissa: And make it to where we're actually, what I was talking about earlier, of like reliving that experience over and over. Because unfortunately, and fortunately for us, our brains.
[00:23:08] Have no concept of if something is happening now or if it's just a memory. Our bodies, our nervous systems, whatever we're experiencing, it thinks it's happening. In the present. And so if we keep reliving these past challenging experiences, but we're not actually moving on from them, at some point it signals to our brain it's still happening.
[00:23:30] Right? And we're probably gonna go find more of those things because we're focusing on it. And so we've gotta, at some point, like I said, we've gotta complete the cycle. So as you talked about, experience really is our best teacher, but only if we slow down. To learn from Learn. So learn. There's a few questions that we'll walk you guys through that are really powerful.
[00:23:50] You could do this as a journaling exercise. If you do use the full focus planner. A lot of these will sound very, uh, familiar to you because these are woven throughout our weekly preview, our quarterly previews. But these are really powerful to do, especially at this time of year as we're really reflecting on the last 11 months.
[00:24:09] So I think where we want to start is kind of what we talked about earlier, what worked
[00:24:14] Joel: right? What do you wanna keep doing?
[00:24:16] Marissa: Yeah. What do you wanna keep doing? What went really well this year, and so this can be things like we talked about. It could be an experience, it could be a way that you chose to show up in your days.
[00:24:27] It could be habits that you cultivated, beliefs that you took on during this year that really served you, so on and so forth. But really starting from a place of abundance first and foremost, what worked? When you look back what actually did work right? And really, you know, if you can start with work. I think for a lot of us, that's an easy place for us to start and just ask like, what worked?
[00:24:52] Oh, I'd used my full focus planner every day, or I did my weekly previews every week, and that really served me. Or I started using ai. In a different way that dramatically improved my leadership, so I wanna keep doing that, or whatever it may be. Right? So we, we wanna start from a place of what worked and then really like what do you wanna continue to do,
[00:25:15] Joel: right?
[00:25:16] Then you want to ask basically, eh, what didn't go so well? What didn't work?
[00:25:20] Marissa: Yeah, what do you wanna stop doing?
[00:25:22] Joel: Right?
[00:25:23] Marissa: What just literally didn't work? What made things more difficult? What felt really friction forward for you? Sure. Every single time it was like you were butting up against that thing. There was so much friction there.
[00:25:38] One of the best things to think about in the context of this question is like, what did you continue to try to avoid or procrastinate
[00:25:45] Joel: when we avoid things? The procrastination is basically an emotional response to something we dread doing for whatever reason. Right? And. Like that's a great signal. If you're constantly putting something off, you may need to reapproach it from a different angle because what you're trying is not gonna get solved just by putting it off and it's not gonna get solved probably just by muscling through, unless you understand what it is.
[00:26:11] Marissa: And, and there's clues there, right? There's things that you need to pay attention to that if you just keep avoiding it, you're actually not gonna learn from. But that's why we slow down right now and, and ask these questions because we can learn every time I had to do that type of a project or that type of a task, I avoided it or I procrastinated it until the last second.
[00:26:31] What about that was I so frustrated with, or didn't wanna do so much that I kept putting it off? And why? Why was that thing so frustrating to, yeah. Well, maybe I didn't feel good at doing that. I didn't feel like I had the skills that I needed or the, in that type of a task. And so those are important cues to listen to.
[00:26:53] Either you need to level up your skills or maybe that's something that you need to get off your plate and like you're not the best person to be doing that project or that type of task, right? So that's important. And there's also probably things in our personal life, you know, I talked about starting with your professional life.
[00:27:08] All these questions also relate to your personal life. Totally. And so maybe there are things personally. You're avoiding or you're just continuing to push off and maybe get curious about that and start asking, well, what about it do I not wanna do? Or, what about it? Do I wanna just keep pushing off until the last second?
[00:27:28] And why? So ultimately we're really asking what didn't work, why, and then what do you wanna stop? Right. What do you wanna start doing differently in this new year?
[00:27:41] Joel: I mean, basically there's what you did and you get the chance to ask the question, what would I do differently either in my behavior or my planning or whatever that would enable me to get a better result.
[00:27:53] I think it's also important to remember, especially as we're looking at the things that didn't work, to be kind to yourself. Yeah. There is a tendency for us sometimes to be harsh or judgmental with ourselves, you know, like. I always do that thing. I did it again, whatever that is and mm-hmm. We're not likely to get great results from beating up on ourselves.
[00:28:14] Yeah. If it worked. We'd already be advanced past where we are. 'cause we do it a lot, right? So I think it's pretty good evidence that it's a lousy tactic. It's better to be compassionate and even curious about why we fall into the same traps, because that might actually point it away to a solution or an answer that's more helpful at the end of the day.
[00:28:35] Marissa: If we think about this kind of exercise as a judgment free zone, it's gonna free you up to get more curious. It's like if you were your own best friend, you weren't yourself, but you were a friend, a very close friend who you loved and cared for dearly, wouldn't you get curious if they said, man. You know, this one thing that I kept doing, it just kept getting in the way.
[00:28:57] Oh, well why? Like, tell me more about that. Or if it's like, man, I could never bring myself to do this thing, right? It's like I kept putting this thing off, or I kept avoiding it, or I never could follow through with it, and I was just so frustrated. Well, why? Well, first of all, it's important for me to be a person of my word, and I was really.
[00:29:15] Out of alignment in that case. Okay. Well, talk to me about that. What did that feel like? Why do you think that was going on? You know, what part of it felt frustrating to you? Just getting curious like you would with a friend rather than, you probably wouldn't show up to a friend and be like, oh my gosh, I don't know.
[00:29:31] You're just toast, man. No. Like you would actually try to help them Yeah. Think through this. And so if you can do that with yourself, and I mean, research backs this up, so like the more compassionate we can be with ourselves. It's actually more effective in changing our behavior, which is really exciting.
[00:29:49] Joel: It's kind of counterintuitive, but the truth is sometimes counterintuitive things are. Actually the more true, like for instance, regret, we often feel like regret is a bad thing, right? Mm-hmm. You've seen the, all the tattoos of the misspelled, no regrets. Tattoos, right? Yeah,
[00:30:06] Speaker 3: right.
[00:30:07] Joel: Regrets are bad. We all know they're bad.
[00:30:10] Except for they're not, regrets are just like open loops in our mind, and there's been research on this too. There's a, in fact, a whole body of research that comes out of this related to what's called the opportunity principle, which basically says that if you have nagging regrets, it is likely because there's still something actionable you could do to quiet those regrets To address them.
[00:30:33] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[00:30:34] Joel: When we can't, when there's like. No path forward to solving something, we usually just let it go. And when we don't let it go, there's usually a reason and it's usually because there's still some path available to us to address it. And that's actually kind of inspiring because if you have something that's been dogging you for a while that you wish could have been different, it might still be able to be different.
[00:30:57] And maybe that regret is a signal to you.
[00:30:59] Marissa: Yeah. It's like, what if regret wasn't the enemy? It was actually the friend saying, Hey, there's some unfinished business
[00:31:07] Speaker 3: here. Right?
[00:31:08] Marissa: And you actually still have a lot of agency to change this.
[00:31:11] Speaker 3: Right.
[00:31:12] Marissa: That's actually really empowering, and I've never thought about regret in that way, but as you're talking, and I'm starting to think about my own regrets, when I think about this last year, I'm like, oh yeah it is because that was unfinished business.
[00:31:25] Yeah. And that means that I still have the ability to. Close that loop, which, how much better am I gonna be after that, uh, than I am sitting right here, right now. Right. Totally. Yeah. I think this is important to, as you're reflecting on this year, what might your regrets be inviting you into in 2026? That would be a really good journaling prompt.
[00:31:52] Totally. Um, just to kind of stream of consciousness, like get it out on paper and then see what's there. Right. Who knows? That's really exciting. So I think lastly, we've gotta figure out, we've been able to really think through like all these things of what's worked, what hasn't worked, and. Everything in between, but now we've gotta ask the questions about what do we wanna actually bring into the future.
[00:32:15] Joel: You've got your red wagon and you're gonna load it up with something. Yeah. It might as well not be the bad stuff.
[00:32:22] Marissa: Yes.
[00:32:22] Joel: So what's the good stuff you're gonna take into 2026?
[00:32:25] Marissa: We talked about this two weeks ago in an episode. We did a whole episode on this, but gratitude really is a superpower when it comes to this.
[00:32:35] So asking this question of what are you grateful for and how can you let that gratitude power help you into this new year totally. Like how can that empower you? How can that strengthen you? How can that make you better? When you're thinking about everything that you're grateful for, which is amazing, so put the gratitude in first, all the things you're grateful for back into your,
[00:33:00] Joel: one thing about that that's useful to remember I think, is sometimes people find gratitude to be a little tricky.
[00:33:05] Like it feels false. They look at the things that that maybe didn't go so well and they have a really hard time expressing gratitude for them, or things are just complicated and they feel like. Gratitude doesn't come easy, and I think it's worth remembering that we can actually just put ourselves into a state, like pretend and just see how it feels once we're doing it.
[00:33:28] And so there's a, a line in the rule of St. Benedict where Benedict mentions something along the lines of a monk who just feels reluctant to pray the Psalms because it just doesn't feel true in that moment. And he says, basically. Say the words and let your heart catch up. And I think gratitude works the same way.
[00:33:45] It's like you express the gratitude and your heart catches up, and so you can kind of like wear it like a coat and, you know Yeah. You'll grow into it and it's yeah, like a really powerful thing just to express it, even if it doesn't feel true or, or it feels awkward or whatever. Just like try it on, just see what happens.
[00:34:04] Marissa: Yeah. It is a little bit of the perfect case in some ways of fake it till you make it right. It's like. If you start saying the things that you're grateful for, I mean, you cannot help it. You're immediately gonna have those emotions that go with gratitude.
[00:34:21] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[00:34:22] Marissa: And it's like it's inevitable. You can't prevent it.
[00:34:24] And what I love about gratitude is you can only experience gratitude. By itself in isolation, which means you're not gonna have all the other emotions, right? All the other baggage that you're probably carrying around all day long when you have that moment of gratitude. So it's like a, a amazing pocket of relief from everything else.
[00:34:45] So start there. That absolutely. We wanna bring into the new year,
[00:34:50] Joel: and then you wanna be reminded of all the things that you did so well this last year. To maintain momentum on some of those things or to give you confidence about the new things you're gonna be doing. Like what are your wins? What are you most proud of?
[00:35:03] How could you let those wins? Build confidence? Those are the kind of questions you want to be asking also about this year as we move into 2026.
[00:35:11] Marissa: Yeah, and just like we talked about, we also wanna remember what did and didn't work. How could you essentially distill those insights into lessons? So just thinking through whatever those may have been for you, I can't love, well, when I'm out of balance.
[00:35:28] Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
[00:35:29] Marissa: That's something that you can learn or my days go best when I start with a plan. That has been true, or when I start with exercise or whatever it may be, right? Or flexibility is as important as planning. Those could be some really powerful lessons that can serve you so well in the new year. If you get curious, uh, enough to identify them and to let them,
[00:35:52] Joel: that's back to Eugene Kin.
[00:35:54] If there's no processing, then all the bruises you get are useless.
[00:35:58] Marissa: So don't just be walking around with a bunch of bruises for no reason.
[00:36:01] Joel: Right. Keep the lessons.
[00:36:02] Marissa: Yeah. We've got a listener question today, Joel. Okay. So Jeremy is asking, can you address identifying and setting goals when you're not sure what you want or you're unclear and afraid to lock into a direction?
[00:36:18] Joel: Yes. This is a great question because this is
[00:36:21] Marissa: a good primary. It's
[00:36:22] Joel: very common for us to sit down at goal setting time and. Feel forced to come up with a, a set of goals. And we may not actually be ready to set the goal yet. We may need to go through a period of exploration where we're actually teasing out what it is that we want.
[00:36:40] And I sometimes think John Acuff has the, the right angle on this. He talks about dating goals instead of marrying them. And sometimes you just want to try it on, you wanna see. And so it's useful to go through essentially a period of. Experimenting or exploration to find the thing that actually resonates with you.
[00:37:00] And the other thing that's worth remembering is that we have, in our culture a lot of things that mediate desire to us. You know, like we know what we want based on what other people want, and whether that's conscious in our minds or not, it's a very present reality that a lot of what we want is mediated by other people and.
[00:37:22] Those desires are actually really thin. They don't matter to us. And what ends up happening is we start a goal that's not like well founded in our own hearts. It doesn't truly excite us and. We just burn out and it doesn't mean anything. And so by March or whatever we give up, you want to do what Luke Burgess talks about as channeling your thick desires, not thin desires.
[00:37:45] They need to be something that is involved in your identity, something that's true about you in a deep sense, because that's where you're gonna find the lasting motivation to help you not only identify a goal that's meaningful, but then stick it out to actually accomplish it.
[00:38:00] Marissa: Yeah. Gosh, that's so good.
[00:38:01] Well, I feel like. As we're talking about reflecting on the past year, there's so much wisdom there, and as you're thinking about what you want for this new year, like use that as fuel for for yourself. Totally. I think you're gonna have a much better experience going into your goal setting from that place versus a place like you're talking about Joel, where you're just kind of going through the motions, you're doing things as you think they should be done, versus really getting deep and analyzing what you really want, what worked, what didn't, what do you want more of?
[00:38:37] What do you want less of all those things. All these questions that we shared today can really help facilitate that.
[00:38:43] Joel: One tool that can really help also is the quarterly preview in your full focus planner. At the end of the quarter, there is the quarterly preview, which enables you to look back at the last quarter and then use the intel from that to project into the new quarter what you wanna see, and in this case, it's a new year, and so the questions in that quarterly preview are just absolutely perfect for this exercise that we're talking about.
[00:39:09] Marissa: And I have to share something kind of exciting that we're gonna be doing. Mm-hmm. So if you're curious about doing your quarterly preview, and maybe you've never done this, maybe you're about to go in and create your goals for 2026, and maybe you've never done a quarterly preview, maybe you've done quarterly preview.
[00:39:26] Since we've had our full focus planner around, regardless, we are actually gonna be offering these live. Where we are going to guide you through, whether that's me or Joel or someone else on our coaching team. We'll be guiding you through the quarterly preview live, like in an actual session where we're helping you walk through this process together.
[00:39:49] And, uh, we're gonna be kicking that off in Q1, but we're only opening that up to two groups of people. And this is really exciting 'cause we've never opened it up beyond one group. Mm-hmm. Until right now. So this is something that we offer inside of our coaching program. We do weekly previews together. We do quarterly previews together.
[00:40:07] But for the first time ever, we've decided that anybody who joins your best year ever live, which is happening this January 2nd. 2020, we are going to give you access to our live quarterly preview. So you get to come every single quarter after you've already gone to your best year ever, you've created your goals for the year, you're gonna be pumped up.
[00:40:28] Trust me, this is gonna be the best, best year ever. Ever, and I'm so excited about it. And then you get to come to those, that's a huge bonus that we're throwing in, that you're gonna be able to walk through this process with literally me, Joel, whoever on our team. We're gonna guide you through this, and you get to ask your questions.
[00:40:46] You get to be there with a group of people. It's all on Zoom, so it's like super easy to access no matter where you live in the world. We're gonna start kicking those off at the end of Q1, which is gonna be amazing. So that's only available if you join us at your best Your Ever Live. You can go to Best Your ever.me in order to get your ticket.
[00:41:05] Uh, those are on sale. We also are giving you a minimalist planner. For free when you join this week, only love that. So you have to join and I think we're only giving those to the first 500 people that join. And like I said, this is like our bestselling planner. People are loving this thing. So if you wanna get it, this is a great way to get it for free.
[00:41:25] And you get your best ever and your quarterly
[00:41:27] Joel: brief, you sign up for Best Year ever Live, and you get not only the quarterly preview, the guided quarterly preview live, but then you also get, and that's four times a year. That's
[00:41:37] Marissa: four times, yeah. You also
[00:41:38] Joel: get. A free full focus planner. Minimalist.
[00:41:43] Marissa: Yes, exactly.
[00:41:44] Which is. Amazing. So, wow. And there's also other goodies, but uh, we would love to have you there. We'd love to walk you through this process, actually live so we can talk to you and we can help you and we can kind of process together. It's a good activity to do as a group, especially in a safe environment where everybody's kind of along this journey together
[00:42:03] Joel: pulling the same direction.
[00:42:04] Marissa: Yeah. I hope y'all would join us. Joel, what are your final thoughts before we wrap up?
[00:42:09] Joel: Uh, I, I mean, there's treasure in the past, you know, there's hard stuff, but there's even good stuff in the hard stuff and then there's all the great stuff. So there's learning from the hard stuff. There's things to celebrate in the great stuff.
[00:42:23] There's treasure there, and it's worth mining and it's worth carrying forward into the new year.
[00:42:27] Marissa: Absolutely. Well, on that note.
[00:42:33] Thanks for joining us on Focus On This.
[00:42:36] Joel: This is the most productive podcast on the internet, so please share it with your friends and be sure to subscribe at wherever you listen or focus on this podcast.com.
[00:42:47] Marissa: And we will be here next week where we're gonna be talking about seven Gif you can give others without spinning a dime.
[00:42:55] Joel: Until then, stay focused. Stay focused.