Before You Plan 2026, Do THIS First

Sam Vander Wielen: If you’re anything like me, you’ve gotten to the end of this year and you’re like, wait, what happened? Like how is it the end of 2025? You probably had a lot of goals this year or some idea of how this year was going to go and some things probably went that way other things, definitely did not go as planned.

I know you’re probably ready to turn the page on this year and hit the ground running in 2026, but without looking back first at what went right this year, what went wrong, and more importantly, how it all felt, we will never have the next year that we really want.

So today we’ll take a minute to check in with ourselves, see how we feel as we approach the end of the year, and reflect on the past year so that we can move into the next one with intention, calm, and confidence.

And real quick, before we dive in, I just wanna welcome you back to On Your Terms® if you’re a regular listener. If you’re new here, welcome. On Your Terms® is a podcast for online business owners who want to be as present in their lives as profitable in their businesses because I believe we can do both. And one of the ways that we do that is by regularly checking in with ourselves and making sure that we actually feel good about the business that we’re working towards building because otherwise really what’s the point?

Back when I started my business, I remember that I was complaining to one of my friends, my good friend, Simi, about like all the stuff that was going on in the business at the time. And you know, she was saying it’s really important to enjoy not only like enjoy what you’re doing, but to actually build a business that you enjoy running. Because otherwise we could all just go back to a nine to five where somebody hands us a paycheck regardless of how much work we technically produce, you know, or we could get benefits again, or like, I don’t know, all the free coffee and the cookies that they used to have at my old law firm, that would be pretty nice.

But if you’re not designing the kind of business that you actually want, then like what’s the point of doing this whole entrepreneurship thing? So like we better take advantage of it and ever since she told me that and we had that conversation, I think about it all the time and I’m like, this is up to me. I wanted to do this for a reason. I wanted to leave being a lawyer. I wanted to leave, uh, you know, working at a big law firm, being under somebody else’s thumb all the time, and so am I designing a business that essentially puts me back in that position or am I running a business that is taking advantage of all the things I said I wanted to do this for?

So that’s kind of like the, for me, the overarching theme of a lot of what I think about when I reflect on how I’m feeling, checking in with myself. But this is a process today that I go through at least once a year. So at the end of every single year, I sit down and I go through this process of reflecting on the past year before I jump into planning the next year.

I know that planning is a lot more fun and tactical and like, especially for me and my brain, like I’m just so strategic and I kind of have that more like, you know, straightforward strategy type thinking brain. I would love to sit down and plan out your funnel strategies and the sales that you’re gonna do and your content strategy all day long. I’m your girl. I would help you out anytime, but I know that that is all, that’s like a really worthless process if you don’t sit down and do some reflection first. So I’m gonna break today’s episode into two parts. The first part that I like to do is really just checking in with yourself right now about how you’re feeling.

And I have six areas of your life that I would invite you to kind of take like an inventory on and see how they’re going. So we’re gonna go over this check-in and reflection on how you’re feeling and what’s coming up for you right now.

I really like doing this inventory first because then when we’re reflecting on our past year and looking at maybe what went well and didn’t go so great, we can start to connect some of the dots of like, oh wow, I’m really low in this like one category of my life.

And maybe that’s influencing why something isn’t going as I want it to go. It’s also going to be huge for next week’s episode when we sit down and talk about planning, because next week is going to be where we sit down and we hash out your plan for your life and your business in 2026, but without knowing how you’re feeling right now and like what you kind of want the balance to be, or like what the, I don’t know, like the homeostasis that is, that you want in all of those different categories, those six categories that we’re going to go over. It’s sort of hard to know how we’re supposed to adjust moving forward and where we’re aiming to spend more time and energy in 2026.

By the way, if you go down to the show notes, I have a absolutely free annual planner guide for you that you can grab and download. It’s got all of the questions that we’re talking about in today’s episode with all of the reflection sections, asking you to look back on the past year, checking in on all these different categories about how you’re feeling with this year, plus, it’s got the section that you need for doing the annual planning that we’re gonna talk about in next week’s episode but if you just wanna even sit down and do annual planning, it’s all right there for you in my free annual guide. So make sure you click the link in the show notes to grab that.

I’ve narrowed down six categories. Of course you can add your own. There’s probably something I’m missing. I already just thought about one that I’m missing because it’s just like, not a big role in my life. But these six, uh, are, are ones that I use to kind of check in with myself first and see how I’m feeling.

First things first, I check in on health and wellness, and when I say health and wellness, I kind of break this down into subcategories of five little subcategories under health and wellness of sleep, food, movement, connection and relaxation / unplugging time. Now of course, again, you could edit any of these if any of these are not important to you.

For me, I found that these are pretty important for like kind of a holistic approach to whether or not I’m doing well. I talked recently in an episode that I’ll link down in the show notes about my six weekly anchors about how much i’ve worked this year on sleep and I shared a little bit about my journey, about how when I had brain surgery, I couldn’t sleep for a long time because my neck and my head hurt so bad. Not just from the surgery, but from all the damage they did to like my muscles and my nerves and everything and then that continued on when my dad got sick. And then when my dad got sick, you can imagine that my sleep didn’t get much better.

So a few months ago, about six months ago when I really started working on my health. I, I knew that sleep was really the foundational thing that set everything else in motion because if I wasn’t sleeping, I didn’t wanna move my body. I didn’t have the energy to, I didn’t eat well because I was crabby and tired, and I just wanted carbs mostly. And I didn’t wanna hang out with other people or connect or do any of that stuff.

So for me, sleep was the important domino that needed to really be like so structured in place in order for everything else. If you have incredible sleep already and you’ve got like this great sleep routine down, great. Maybe one of the other things that we’re talking about today is your domino, and that’s the thing that’s going to unlock and, and be like, oh wow, this, this is really making me feel more present and alert and creative and like I have more energy and all of the things that you need in order to not only be a full fledged human, but to run a successful online business.

When I’m looking at my food often, again, that’s kind of following from the sleep thing, but I look at the food in terms of like, am I making time to eat? Like it’s not just like, am I eating perfectly? Am I eating the perfect amount of protein? It’s like, am I taking time to eat three meals? Am I on my phone while I eat? Am I eating things I love? Am I trying new recipes and cooking new things? Because I love that, so that brings me a lot of joy. So I’m looking at that with food.

Movement. I mean, for me personally, I love working out. I’m one of those weirdos. But for me, looking at my movement is more like, am I doing movement that’s supporting me in where I’m at in my health and wellness and my like energy journey? Am I doing movement that makes me feel good and strong? Like not just like am I making sure that I get 60 minutes of movement or something every day.

I also look at connection when I evaluate health of just like how well am I connecting with myself, with my, uh, husband Ryan, with my friends and my family. But we’re gonna talk a little bit more in, in a deeper way about connection in a moment. But I do think that’s an important part of health.

Last but not least on this first one, I look at relaxation and unplugging time. And my biggest tip for you on evaluating how you’re feeling about relaxation is that I read the Substack Post by Leslie Stephens on her Substack, Morning person, where she talked about rest, and she talked about how sometimes we accidentally associate rest with like couch rot time. Like, oh, I laid on the couch and watched a movie, therefore I rested and not only is this sometimes just not restful, right? Because for one, we’ll like pick up our phone or people are still interrupting us, or people doom scroll while they watch TV or whatever. Sometimes that’s actually not the kind of rest that we need.

Sometimes it’s rest through expression. Like, I need to, like doodle and like get something out of my brain. I need to write, I need to go see like a comedy show. I need to go to a concert. Like, sometimes that’s restful too, right? So I would encourage you that when you reflect on how relaxed you’re feeling or how you feel like you’re doing with relaxation and unplug time. Are you treating it like a checkbox or are you actually checking in with like, what kind of relaxation do I need? Do I need peace and quiet? Like, do I need to go somewhere for a day?

Do I need to read a book versus watch tv? ’cause like I don’t need as much stimulation. Right? So just checking in with yourself about what you really need when it comes to relaxing.

The second thing I check in with myself is money, finances in my life. You know, for me, I obviously, I own my own business. I pay myself a salary. So it’s like looking at how am I doing with that, but also how am I doing with saving? How am I doing with spending? Am I purchasing too many things? Do I just feel like I’m spending mindlessly, like, do I have a good idea? How am I doing on saving for retirement, checking my 401ks, like seeing how those are doing. All of the, all of the different money issues, right? So I think that’s a good one to check in on just how you’re feeling around, around this topic, especially for those of you who might just like to ignore it like I do.

The third area to check in with yourself is how you’re feeling about work. Whether that’s your career, your nine to five, your business, whether you’re thinking about starting a business, and maybe you’re spending a lot of late nights right now doing all that, but how are you feeling? What’s it bringing up for you? If you had to rate all of these things on a scale from one to 10, how’s it going for you?

The fourth thing I look at is connection, relationships, family, and even community. Community is a huge one for me. I wouldn’t have included community until I moved where I live on Long Island because it’s amazing here and the people are amazing here and I feel like because I like it here so much, I’ve, I’ve really enmeshed myself in the community, both in my immediate community, my neighborhood is something to like, write stories about, but also the greater community of my actual town, like just trying to get more involved in community events and I go to all the little like art fairs and I go to the local art gallery and I go to history talks and things at the university and like I’ve just tried to get myself more involved in the community.

For me, this can be even something as simple as like, I noticed that in my community, when I introduce myself to people I see on a regular basis, like the person working the counter at the coffee shop, I always go to, or the guy who always takes my credit card at the gas station that I go to, because I’m from Jersey and I refuse to fill my own gas and it’s, it should be a crime here in New York that they require you to fill your own gas, except that there’s a gas station down the street from me where the guy will do it for you. So I go there and so I, I asked him his name. Right. So it’s like just even little things like that where you’re just like, wow, that makes it so much more pleasant though, when I pull up, he’s like, Hey Sam. And they know Hudson’s, he’s like hanging out the window half the time or when I go to my coffee shop, they know me, they know my order, I know them. I ask them how it’s going. How’s that trip to Italy? What’s going on with skateboarding? I ask, right?

It just, it’s, it seems little, it doesn’t have to be something huge where you have to like become a big volunteer in an organization in your community. Although that is fantastic too, right? But I appreciate that you are busy and you might not have time to do all of these things. And so just look for little things, like there could be something really small. Is there a person that you see every week who you’re like, you know what, I’ve never asked them their name. I invite you to do it.

I also invite you to think about what people in your life make you feel the most alive, or what people in your life make you feel the most yourself, maybe the most comfortable, most at home, like it’s whatever’s important to you.

I know that for me, I can often walk away from people who I don’t know that well thinking like, oh, I shouldn’t have said that. Or they probably think I’m really weird, or they think that it was stupid that I said this, or I’m really sarcastic and I have a dry sense of humor and like, that probably didn’t land right.

But when I look at the people who I’m closest to, I don’t have to do that when I walk away from our conversations. I might not be their favorite. You know, I might not be their cup of tea all the time, but at least they know what my, my brand is like, it’s fine and they know how I am and I don’t, I don’t feel like, oh, I have to go apologize that I’m like a super sarcastic or something like that. So I like to, I like to reflect on like what people in my life make me feel that way. And then from there it’s often interesting to think like when you look at the inventory of what people make you feel most alive or like yourself, or most comfortable or inspired. How much time do you spend with those people? And how much time do you spend with those people versus all the people in your life who don’t make you feel that way? That’s a really interesting one. When I used to live back in Philly at home when I used to do this exercise, it was completely flipped on its head, like I spent all of my time with people who didn’t make me feel that great, and I spent very little time with people who did. And so it’s really interesting to see what happens when you can like balance out or flip that equation.

I’d also invite you to think about what makes you feel more connected to other people, or is it that when you go to things in your community that makes you feel connected? Like doing an activity side by side or going with a friend to a candle making class or going and getting tea or taking a walk with a friend is like, that’s way more connecting for you then getting a drink or getting dinner or something like that.

There’s no right or wrong for any of the things that we’re talking about today, so it’s really just like letting this stuff come up without judgment and starting to notice some of the patterns of what really makes you happy and what doesn’t like what’s adding energy and what’s taking it away.

Speaking of the fifth thing I like to reflect on is joy and fun, and despite the fact that my middle name is literally Joy, I’m not kidding, I’m Samantha Joy. I am the worst at this category. I often get sweaty when I start to see like journal prompts that are like, what’s bringing you joy this week? Or like, how are you going to add joy to your week? Or, what’s something that bringing you joy right now? I’m like, I don’t know. It feels like so much pressure. Maybe it’s that I think about it too big, right? I think maybe we’ve romanticized or Hollywood- ified the idea of joy, that it’s supposed to be this like exuberant, like overwhelming feeling. And maybe that’s not it. Maybe that’s not it. Especially as an adult with responsibilities, who’s grieving, who, uh, is super sensitive and like, I’m still not over the fact that I saw a little animal on the side of the road yesterday, like that kinda stuff sticks with me for a while. It, it’s just like, I’m not that kind of person.

I’m not like shitting out sunshine or rainbows all the time. So that’s just, that’s just how I am and I’m very sensitive and I have a feeling that you are too. And I think when you are that way and you feel what’s going on in the world right now, it’s kind of hard to like look around sometimes, you know, to have days where you’re like, everything’s amazing when you kind of feel like the world, it’s like falling apart. So with that being said, this is a good example where this is a category that when I reflect on it, I’m like, uh, I don’t feel like I’m really strong in this area, and so I have to spend a little more time on it and because I’m not so strong, unlike. Here’s all these things that are bringing me joy. I tend to like skip over it and go to the other stuff, and that shows me that I need to spend a little time. It’s also it it’s not just, I shouldn’t even say should. The word should. It’s something I want to spend more time, right? It’s, it’s something that when I look at it and I say. Yeah, I don’t really know like where all these like joyful pockets of my week are. Um, as a 38-year-old adult woman, I don’t know. There, there are joyful moments. There’s like, I see sunshine and birds and like, there’s so many animals in my neighborhood and I see them. I see the little kids playing outside and they, how much they love Hudson and like those things bring me joy, but I don’t have these like overwhelming moments. So is that an area where I would like to focus on more? Of course. And so by doing this exercise, it’s just something that. I dunno, brings it to my attention and it makes me actually have to pause and reflect on, on how I’m bringing joy into my life.

The sixth thing that I like to reflect on how it’s going is my learning and self-development. I always wanna learn new things and I’m very intellectually curious. So then the reflection kind of comes, uh, for me it was like, am I putting time towards that? Right? So I’ll often become interested in things, how’s that going? The other place where this is really important for me to reflect, and I don’t know about you if you have a little tinge of the ADD or ADHD? Uh, I don’t know what I have.

All I know is that I start a lot of things and I don’t finish. I also finish a lot of things that I do start, as my therapist points out, but I start a lot of things. I have a lot of notebooks, I have a lot of tabs open, and I often will collect a lot of things without then actually doing it. So for me, this is a really good place for me to reflect of like, am I taking on too many things? What things do I actually like as my therapist puts it, what rabbit holes do I actually want to go down? So I’m interested in like a million different things, but where am I really like wanting to go with my learning and my self development?

Okay. So from there, as we did a little bit of a barometer, life barometer check on ourselves, I think it’s important to now shift into reflecting back on this year so that we can apply some of the things from these different categories to what we’re about to talk about. But like I think that we want to reflect back on some more concrete things as well.

Now, one caveat I want you to keep in mind as we’re reflecting on 2025 is that I want you to think about measuring. In terms of progress, not in terms of distance to your goal. So if you can put the mindset on as we’re having this conversation of seeing how far you’ve come versus being like, but I’m still so far away from where I wanna go.

It’s going to be so much better for you because for one, studies actually show that when you think of things in terms of how far you’ve come, how far you’ve moved from where you used to be, then you actually get enough motivation to keep it going.

So by regularly checking in and seeing that you’ve actually made progress, despite how small it it may be or feel to you studies show that that will be the thing that gets you ultimately to your goal, versus people who sit there and constantly judge themselves like of how far away they are from the finish line. They kind of kill off the dopamine and don’t end up accomplishing the goal.

So with that all in mind, the first thing I want you to reflect on is what you accomplished this year. And this can be as broad as you would like it. It can be, you know, something really specific like I got to go speak at KIT’s Craft and Commerce conference like that was something just like very specific, but it can also be something like I started setting boundaries with people and turned on invitations to things that I totally would’ve said yes to in the past.

You can also list out things, again using this mindset of measuring your progress of things that you accomplished this year, like how much further along are you in certain things, even if you’re not right now here to sitting here today where you thought you would be, how much further along are you this year from having gotten started? I would love for you to list out those things.

The second one, I think, is my favorite one, which is probably an odd one to have as a favorite, but I also want you to reflect on things that you let go of this year and then I want you to reflect on how it felt to let go of those things. Maybe it was an idea that you had, maybe it was a mindset that you let go of.

Maybe it was a person, maybe it’s a program, a business entirely. Maybe it was a goal that you always thought you wanted to do, or the idea that you like wanted to be a YouTuber and you finally let that go. What did you let go of this year and how did it feel?

On the flip side, reflect on things that you added this year to your life, to your business, to whatever it is that you want, and how that felt. Did you add people to your team? Did you add, uh, some help at home? Did you add a new program or service, whatever it is that you added this year, but how did it feel to add that thing on? It doesn’t necessarily have to be good. It could be I added this thing and turns out upon reflection, it doesn’t feel as good as I thought it would or maybe you were like resistant to going to therapy or a couple’s therapy and you added that in this year and it was way better than you thought, right? So spend some time reflecting on things you added and how it felt.

The next thing to reflect on is what you didn’t get to this year, why you didn’t get to it, in your opinion, and how it felt to not get to it. This is a really important one to reflect on because often we can get to the end of the year and be like, oh, I thought I was going to launch that new course, and I thought I would have a new website, and my goal was to start my podcast this year and I didn’t get to any of it and sometimes I get to the end of the year and I do that and I’m like oh, actually, I’m really glad that I didn’t get to that thing because it turns out I didn’t need it or turns out that I didn’t want it or something like that, i’m going in a different direction. Other times I didn’t get to something that year and I’m like, oh, I’m so frustrated that I haven’t done that yet.

So that kind of moves it up in the line for what I’m going to do first in 2026, and that’s what we’ll talk about next week. So it’s really important to spend some of this time reflecting on what you didn’t get to, why and how it felt. Check in with yourself about whether those things are still important to you, or did you learn something that now says to you, you know what, that’s not, that’s not a goal, or that’s not important to me anymore, and that’s okay, we’re gonna let it go.

The next thing I want you to do is grab a piece of paper, draw a T on the top, and on the left side make a column for accelerators, and on the right side, make a column for constrictors. This is where I want you to list out things that felt like accelerators in your life or your business, and then I want you to list out things that felt like constrictors in your life, in your business.

You could also think of it as a bottleneck, like what things are slowing you down, what things are getting in your way, what things are causing some friction. These are going to be so helpful for applying in next week’s episode to start looking at like, okay, these things were accelerators and you liked it, I guess, if you liked them, okay, great. How do we lean into those even more next year?

For those things that were constrictors and you start to see patterns of like, oh, these things are slowing me down and this is not helping me, this is actually hurting me and my life and my business. Those are things we’re gonna work on trying to let go or figure out a solution for in 2026 so that we can actually just remove them entirely.

Last but not least, I want you to look at where you felt supported this year and where you felt unsupported. This is gonna be really, really important again, similar to the accelerators and constrictors because if we take a look at where you felt supported in both your life and your business this year, those are things that we can accelerate, we can lean into even more.

If there was a specific person, a process, somebody who you have doing a task for you or a favor for you, that’s just like taking something off your plate. Those are things that we can, first of all, we can thank them and and be very grateful, and we can lean into that or we can say, where else can we start doing even more of that? Or can I ask that person to do even a little bit more and start expanding that even more and be even more supported in 2026.

On the unsupported side, same thing. It’s maybe you’re not asking for something that you need from your partner or somebody in your family at home or at work, or from your team in your business, right? And so there can be all kinds of things that can come up when we take a look at where am I feeling unsupported and why.

Just as like an introspective side note, I always find it interesting when I do this exercise and I look at where I feel unsupported. Maybe it’s just me, but oftentimes where I feel unsupported is actually something that like I am not doing for myself.

So I might initially write it down as like, I feel unsupported by other people in this area, and then I’m like, wait, that’s actually something I can just do for myself like not a task. I don’t mean that, but like if I’m, if I write something like I don’t feel supported in my life from people thinking I can like expand beyond legal and like expand my business and whatever, I had to be honest with myself and be like, do I support myself? Do I believe in it? Or am I expecting everybody else to offer me support and enthusiasm around something that I’m not even doing for myself. So I think it’s really important to be introspective in that area well in every area, but that one in particular.

So when I reflected on my year this year, I just wanted to share with you maybe some of my own answers. Um, I had realized that we had accomplished a lot, especially this year on a more just like, I don’t know, straightforward, kind of tactical level. Like I had recorded an audio book this year. I released a book, my very first published book with a big five publisher, like I accomplished my dream this year, guys, like, it was crazy. It was a big, big year for me this year. But my book, When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy, came out on April 15th. We had huge book parties for it. I had friends come in from like all over the country. That was so cool. We had gigantic launches this year. Three gigantic launches, like all in a row in February, june and October, they were huge and not just huge but like full of really great people and a lot of enthusiasm and the team did great and I just thought they went really smoothly and they were a lot of fun. Yes, there are a lot of work to like get set up, but the actual promo itself is like not very hard. Once we’re, once we’re there, it’s kinda like a wedding. It’s like you’ve done everything. I was very proud of, of the team and everybody for the launches. And then same with like a lot of the speaking stuff this year. Like I got to speak at Kit’s Craft and Commerce, which for me was just a dream and okay, I’m like not a very confident person. I would say that that is not, I don’t feel like I am, but it was really funny ’cause I walked off stage at Kit and I was like, damn, I killed it and that’s what everybody told me too. So I’m just gonna go with it. But the real point is that I had a lot of fun and I was so nervous ’cause there were so many people there and so many of like the biggest, best faces in the industry staring back at me. And so it was a lot of like pressure and nerves and it was my first keynote and everything else, and like, what a hell of a keynote to give for your first one, so that was awesome. I got to speak in Austin twice. Once at Courtnie Nichols Event for Travel Professionals. And then at Jay Papasan’s event, the One Thing Summit, that was just a couple of weeks ago. That was amazing. Again, like the nicest people doing the coolest things, it was such a great event.

I got to go on Tory Dunlap’s podcast Financial Feminist, which I cannot bull believe. I got to go on Pat Flynn’s podcast and Nathan Barry’s podcast. So many cool podcast interviews this year. So many people were so supportive of the book and having me on and all kinds of things. It was just, that was just very overwhelming and also an incredible experience.

Something that I’m really happy about that we accomplished this year is that On Your Terms® really grew this year, especially recently, I think like fully committed to giving it the attention that it’s deserved and that I’ve wanted, um, to do for so long. And it’s just cool to finally see some growth after doing this for four and a half years. So yeah, there’s that.

At the end of August, I also started up my Substack called Beyond Business. I’ll leave a link in the show notes in case you wanna join there. It’s where I write more personal stuff behind the scenes, but I started that up and, uh, got consistent with it in August, and that has really grown. So that’s been really cool. And on the personal side, I, I feel like I, I mean, a lot of my personal accomplishments this year were just. Business related, I have to be honest. But one big non-business one was that I bought a house in Vermont in August, so that was really cool. We bought a little tiny cottage that’s very cute in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by thousands of acres of preserved land, and it’s very cool and peaceful and full of mountains and bears and bobcats and coyotes and all kinds of things.

More importantly, I think I let go of a lot this year, and I’m still even in the process of letting go of right now. But I let go of so much more emphasis on social media. I’m obviously still on social. I’m active and engaged there, but I just feel like I’ve, I’ve definitely changed my personal relationship with it, especially when it comes to consumption and doom scrolling.

And I’m also just sort of mentally preparing for the fact that it seems like people are spending less time on social and as a as a like, you know, world, that’s what I want. For us as a, as a group of humans, I really want us to do that. So I’m supportive. But as a business owner, it’s just something I’m thinking a lot about in the backend of like, okay, if people start spending less time on these apps, if ads aren’t as much of a dominant force, where else are leads coming from?

So like, I’ve let go of a lot this year, but it also raises a lot of questions for me.I think I kind of let go of YouTube. I go on and off of YouTube to be honest, I’m the worst when it comes to YouTube. It just is something that feels like a much heavier lift, even though I don’t mind like doing videos and I do so much for social media.

I do so many videos for everything, but for some reason, like I get frustrated by like, oh, you have to perfectly, um, kind of like outline it and say things like this and do it like this, and everything’s super strategic. I think podcasting works a lot better for me and my personality because it’s much more organic and relaxed.

I also let go of a lot of mentorship and consultants and like hiring a lot of people from the outside to come in and like, tell me what I’m doing wrong. Which I’m not saying that it’s not important to have consultants and mentorship and all of that, but sometimes you can gather a lot of opinions and like everybody’s gonna have a different one. And I, I’m just a big believer in doing.

So, I think this year was a year of letting a lot of that go. I also let go of having a lot of meetings on Mondays. So my Mondays used to be filled with meetings, which was kind of wrecking the rest of my week because I felt like I just came in to the week exhausted and already from like all these meetings. And then by the time I got my feet under me in the week, it was like it was already Friday. So that has been a big shift, as well as doing away with mourning. Meetings throughout the week, so really emphasizing to the team that I need creative mornings to be protected. I did an episode about this, uh, recently I can drop a link in the show notes, but I talked about how I’m structuring my workday these days with letting my most creative thing be done first, and like having that block and not having meetings or anything else I have to do until a little bit later in the day.

One of the things that I didn’t get to this year was that I thought that I would create a product for you all that had probably something more to do with growing your business, like email marketing related or funnel related, and I thought that that would’ve been a great idea to have after my book came out.

And maybe I messed that up in terms of timing, but I just did not have the capacity for it this year. Launching a book is no joke. It’s like launching a whole business and a product and a, and like a whole marketing thing all at once. It is a lot. And then on top of having like three mega huge launches so we had like hundreds and hundreds of new customers coming in at a time. It, it was just too much. So I’m partially disappointed that I didn’t get to it and partially like, Hmm, it’s also okay. ’cause I think I have a better idea for what I would do now.

Huge accelerators for me this year were definitely all of the appearances, the podcast interviews, the speaking engagements that I got because it got a lot of exposure to a lot of new people. Some of the biggest podcasters that I got on their podcast were because they were sitting in the audience when I gave these talks. Um, some I didn’t even know. And so that helped a lot. And then they invited me to like their summits and their speaking engagements. So that helped a lot. I thought that was a big accelerator. Obviously my book was a gigantic accelerator ’cause writing a book just opens a lot of doors for you that were just frankly not open to me before.

And I think all the connections and relationships that I’ve made, whether it’s because of the people I’ve met, I, I stand, this is a hill I will die on that Kit’s Craft and Commerce is the best conference that we go to all year, that people there are amazing. And I, I frankly, feel like you could literally just go to that conference and meet enough people for the whole year if you genuinely spend time there like wanting to connect with people. I just think it has the best people and the people I’ve met there have like become friends and then people I’ve done work with, people who have referred me all kinds of stuff.

A lot of my constrictors are probably things that I’m feeling like harsh on myself about. But I did a lot of travel this year and that was tough because it just took a lot out of me for my energy and especially as I’m working on my health right now and like trying to calm down my nervous system after like years of really intense grief. I, it, the travel was just a lot.

I also think I then take on a lot at once, right? I’m like, let’s do this launch and like, let’s head on a Black Friday sale for the first time ever and like, let’s redo the site and let’s revamp the podcast. Let’s get on YouTube. So like, I have a, I’m never short on ideas.

I have a lot of ideas and like ideas are good, but it’s a lot to implement and I know it’s a lot on me. It’s a lot on the team. So it’s, it’s just a lot. And then we had a lot coming in this year on top of all that, a lot of requests, media requests, podcast interviews, speaking engagements, the travel. That kinda stuff.

I know that, like what I’m going through with grieving, the kind of like, I don’t know, situational or long, long lasting perhaps depression that it’s given me still not feeling like I can, like, quote unquote run as fast as I used to. That is, is a constrictor. But like I, I would also encourage you as you’re making your constrictor list, and not all constrictors necessarily need to be a bad thing, like I am not operating at the same level that I used to in terms of output, productivity, energy, all of those kinds of things. It’s also okay, like I don’t, I didn’t need to act like I used to for forever in my business, and I don’t know that it was healthy. So that’s something that I think is constricting me if I’m judging myself based on my past, like self or the past version of me that ran this business.

The last constrictor that I’m feeling right now is just like I’m, I’m getting in my own way. I’m in my own head and I’ve already made a lot of shifts and I’m making a lot of changes to combat this. But like, I’m sitting here talking a lot about how like, oh, I wanna broaden when I talk about beyond legal, or I wanna be known like I wanna build a podcast that’s like as big as Mel Robbins or Glennon Doyle. I, I basically wanna write and, and podcast like Mel Robbins and like Glennon Doyle, I say this all the time now I’ve started to be honest about it, and so. I will sit here and I will say that, but I often will just kind of swirl in like saying it and swirl in my uncertainty over like, well how do I do that? How do I get closer? How do what if people don’t wanna hear me talk about that? How do I do it?

And I think just recently I’ve started to be like, you know what? I’m just gonna start talking about it and I’m gonna start doing it. And I’ve started to make some cuts to my life and my business that are like I don’t wanna be in all these groups. I don’t wanna be in all these calls. I don’t wanna travel so much. I don’t wanna do this so that I can just like start creating and stop talking about it.

So those are sort of my 2025 reflections. I just thought maybe it would be helpful or even remotely interesting. I don’t know. You’ll have to tell me, but I can’t wait to hear what was like the biggest thing that came up for you in doing any of these exercises today. I would love to know which of the six categories that I mentioned earlier, like health and wellness money, career, connection, joy, and fun or learning are the ones that you were like, Ooh, I need more there.

I can also recognize, I said at the top of the episode, I missed one. I can also recognize that for you, spirituality or religion might be one that you would wanna add, or maybe you consider that under connection and community, but because it just doesn’t play a role in my life, I honestly, I just don’t, I just don’t think about it, and I didn’t add it here, but I fully recognize that that might be important to you. So that would be another good one to add.

With that next week’s episode is going to be all about planning our year next year. So I really need you to sit down and take a couple of minutes this week to actually reflect on some of these things so that when we sit down next week together, we can put a little bit of pen to paper and figure out a plan for the year. Yes, we will talk about planning your year in terms of like, how do I put things on the calendar and like plan lunches and make it all make sense and give myself enough time and space them out. I’ll talk to you all about the logistical business stuff. I will also talk to you about planning your year as a business owner, taking care of yourself, making sure that you are well taken care of, that your energy and health and wellness are all managed. So we will check in about all of that.

Next week. So I need you to go ahead and do me two things. I need you to sit down and reflect on these things, and then I need you to write to me about it. So I need you to send me a dm. Let me know if you listened to this episode, did you like it? What came up for you? You can respond to my email. You can uh, DM me on Instagram at samvanderwielen, whatever you want to do. But I would love to hear from you what’s going on with you. And then next week we will sit down and we will plan, plan, plan together. All right. I look forward to it. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll talk to you soon.

I’m gonna drink my potion now.

Enjoy my friend. Well, this is bringing me joy. It brings me joy to have these moments with you. The best part would be if I spilled this whole thing. Don’t me, don’t say that.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.