What Do You Actually Want In Life?
Happy New Year.
I hope 2025 was meaningful for you, and that you’re stepping into 2026 with a desire for personal flourishing, training, and high-performing leadership.
This time of year always brings a weird kind of whiplash.
We spend the final days of the year in a blend of rest and frantic fog with uncommon white space on the calendar, losing track of what day it is, maybe even a low-grade restlessness that comes with a change of pace and idleness we don’t experience anywhere else in a crammed year.
Then we emerge out of that fog and rev our internal engines toward a new year.
Hopefully there's a sense of reflection of this year and anticipation for the new year.
But out of that reflection, however structured, often comes pressure to add or change.
“It’s time to head into the new year with some changes.”
“New year, new me.”
So we scramble to manufacture a couple goals from the uneasiness we feel when we finally slow down long enough to notice our lives.
A year just passed.
What do we have to show for it?
What was all that movement about?
What's all this new movement going to be about?
We don’t love how we feel when we sit with those questions.
So we respond the same way we always do. We scurry and scramble to formulate a “resolution.”
2026 will be the year we tighten the finances and our waistline. It'll be the year we burn more calories and less money.
Throw a few bucket list items in there, maybe a road race or trip and there you have it. New year, new you. New year's resolution time.
If that path has worked for you - keep going! I'm not here to mess with your vibe.
But if you’re tired of the well-worn New Year’s resolution cycle, let me suggest a different approach.
Subtraction.
Before you add a new goal, what if you subtract the noise?
Subtract the borrowed ambition.
Subtract the need to impress.
Subtract the version of success you absorbed from your industry, your peers, or your own insecurity.
Because the problem usually isn’t that we don’t have enough structure, and need to add.
The problem is that we skip the most important part - Clarity around what we really want, and why we want it.
So instead of setting some resolutions, can I suggest a different exercise? An exercise from personal experience and coaching experience.
Get a blank piece of paper and write at the top:
"What do I want in life?"
Zoom out beyond your job, your title, your career ladder, your current season. Ask what you actually want most, and why.
Start with: “I want ______.”
And write as many as you can.
Your leadership is the overflow of your lifestyle. And your lifestyle orients itself around what you really want. This is why resolutions don't stick. We're trying to adjust our lifestyle without deeper thought on what we really want, and why.
Back in 2022, I was going through intense personal and professional strain leaving my career as a college baseball coach. When I began that career journey, I thought I’d do it until I was 75. Suddenly I had transitioned out of it before I was 35, drifting aimlessly, struggling internally. Living with a chronic frustration about where things were.
It felt like I was a boxer flat on my back professionally, staring at the ceiling, knowing I needed to get up off the canvas, but completely disoriented.
We weren’t in a good spot financially after years of carving a path in college coaching, moving around the country. Everybody in the industry knows the first 10 years you don't make any money. I never made it to year 11 and beyond, selecting to get out of it without a sure path toward what was next, only a distant vision. I remember being highly frustrated at where my life and leadership had landed.
So one day I opened a note on my phone, titled it "What Do I Want In Life" and began writing.
The days since writing it haven’t been perfect.
But it was the beginning of much-needed clarity and purpose.
Something I have a strong sense of years later and will be enjoying in 2026.
Here are a few things I wrote at the time, not the full list.
I want an active faith that keeps me grounded and healthy at a soul level. I want to get closer to God as I age. I want to slide from this life right into the next.
I want a vibrant relationship with Ashley until we die. I want friendship together, growth together, and to become the absolute best version of ourselves.
I want great relationships with my sons. I want our relationship to mature into friendship later in life. I want to help them flourish in pursuit of a meaningful life.
I want to be financially fit as a family. I don’t want debt. I want to be generous.
I want to do work that uses my strengths. It can be hard, but I want to wake up knowing my skills are in service to others. I want to help people become their best at work, on teams, and at home.
I want to keep pushing my mind and body. I want to write books and run races, not for a medal or a best seller list, but for the pursuit of mastery and growth over time.
Those are just a few of my examples. They don’t need to be yours.
But instead of spending the first part of 2026 in an unsustainable motivational frenzy, followed by more drifting than when you started, what if you got honest about what you really want? And more importantly why you want it.
This is much deeper than “new year, new me.”
It's about being honest and subtracting things that don’t align with that honesty.
It's not about "manifesting" things. There's no "If you can dream it, you can do it" talk in this exercise.
It's about assuring the daily lifestyle you're living is actually in alignment with your ambitions.
Because if there's one thing we know, our lifestyle will not automatically align itself with our purest most purposeful ambitions. Our lifestyle will automatically drift where it drifts.
WE have to re-orient it back on purpose.
YOU have to re-orient it back on purpose. Not your spouse, not your boss. You have to do it.
Start with this exercise in 2026 and I'm confident you'll feel better about where it leads.
Start with resolutions in 2026 and I'm equally confident you'll be drifting by mid quarter 1.
Happy New Year!
Stay The Course,
PS - This question shows up often in my work with leaders navigating pressure and transition. If you try the exercise and want to talk through what it reveals, I’m always open to a conversation. Just reply and let me know.
