I’m going to be honest, 2025 WASN’T my year. I wanted perfect grades in university. I wanted to be fit enough to run a 5K in 20 minutes. And I wanted to find a deeper connection with the voice within myself. Academically, physically, spiritually, I felt like a failure.
But that’s not how I felt throughout the year.
A week ago, I stumbled across many 2026 self-help videos. We have entered the timeframe where we reflect on the fruits of this year and create our next set of New Year’s resolutions. Creators have been releasing their personal guides to setting financial, spiritual, and academic goals.
As I watched these videos and drafted goals for myself, I took a moment to visualize reaching them in the next year. However, no matter how detailed or vivid my visualizations were, I just couldn’t see myself realistically attaining these goals.
That’s because I didn’t have a plan.
That’s the one thing New Year’s resolutions miss. New Year’s resolutions are just that, a list of resolutions.
Without a proper plan to guide you towards reaching your goals, it’s easy to set this list of resolutions to the side and completely forget about it.
As I reflect on how this year has been, I vaguely recall my New Year’s resolutions and realize that I’m not where I want to be. I threw them to the side, and now at the end of the year, I sulk about what I could’ve been.
I’m willing to acknowledge I made mistakes this year, and I didn’t reach my fullest potential. But that’s okay, 2026 is going to be MY YEAR. And I want to help you make it YOURS as well.
So here is my personal guide to making 2026 the best year ever, in all areas of your life.
What this guide covers:
This is a 4-step guide. Step 1 is choosing your focus areas, and you can choose goals from 10 different focus areas, academic, spiritual, financial, love, etc. Step 2 helps you define them and set your initial goals, while steps 3, 4, and 5 help you make them more specific and prime your mind to achieve them.
How to Make 2026 Your Year
Before we get started, make sure you have a pen and paper with you. You’re gonna want to write your plan to make your dreams tangible.
If you want a more structured space to write, grab my free guided PDF and type in the blanks! The PDF is linked below:
Step 1 – Choose Focus Areas
First, let’s choose some focus areas. This list covers different focus areas. Choose 1–3 from the list below and write them down:
- Spiritual Life
- Physical Wellbeing
- Mental & Emotional Well-Being
- Creative Expression
- Academic / Intellectual Growth
- Career / Purposeful Work
- Platonic and Romantic Love
- Financial Life
- Relationships & Community
Step 2 – Define Your Focus Areas and Set Your Initial Goals
Now that you have your focus areas, step 2 is to define them. Before you set your goals, you have to know what each area means to you. Define them in your own words.
Below, I have listed 6-7 questions for each of the focus areas. Answer the questions you feel are most related to your goals for each focus area you chose.
Spiritual Life
- What gives your life a sense of meaning right now?
- When do you feel most connected to yourself or something larger than you?
- What practices help you feel grounded, even on tough days?
- What beliefs or values are you outgrowing?
- When do you feel most aligned with who you are becoming?
- What does stillness mean to you right now?
- Where do you feel resistance when you slow down?
Physical Wellbeing
- What does “feeling healthy” mean in your body, not on paper?
- How do you want your body to support the life you’re living?
- What signals does your body give you that you often ignore?
- How do you treat your body when you’re tired or overwhelmed?
- What forms of movement feel like care rather than punishment?
- How do you want your body to feel at the end of an average day?
Mental & Emotional Well-Being
- What emotions do you experience most often, and how do you respond to them?
- What currently drains your mental energy? What restores it?
- What would emotional steadiness look like in your everyday life?
- What patterns show up when you’re under stress?
- How safe do you feel expressing difficult emotions?
- What thoughts do you return to most often?
- What does emotional rest look like for you?
Creative Expression
- How do you express yourself when no one is watching?
- What creative outlets feel energizing rather than performative?
- What would creating purely for yourself look like this year?
- What creative work feels unfinished inside you?
- When was the last time you created without an audience in mind?
- What blocks your creativity: fear, perfection, time, or energy?
- How do you know when something you’ve made feels true?
Academic / Intellectual Growth
- What topics or questions keep pulling at your curiosity?
- How do you enjoy learning when there’s no pressure to achieve?
- What kind of thinker do you want to become?
- What questions do you want to live with this year?
- How do you challenge your own assumptions?
- What kind of learning excites you but intimidates you?
- How do you integrate what you learn into daily life?
Career / Purposeful Work
- What parts of your work feel meaningful, and which feel misaligned?
- What kind of problems do you want to spend your energy solving?
- How do you want your work to serve your life, not consume it?
- What would meaningful progress look like in one year?
- What skills feel worth developing now?
- Where do you feel underused or overstretched?
- How do you want to feel at the end of a workday?
Platonic and Romantic Love
For this section, I’ve actually previously written a guided journal entry for the topic. The journal entry covers defining love in your own words to how others have influenced your definition of love. I would suggest you follow along with this journal entry and then return to this article to set your goals regarding love.
Here is a link to the guided journal prompt: Mature Love – A Guided Journal Prompt
Financial Life
- What does financial security mean to you, personally?
- How do your current money habits reflect your values?
- What emotions come up when you think about money, and why?
- What does “enough” mean to you?
- How does money influence your sense of freedom or constraint?
- What financial habits support your future self?
- What stories about money are you ready to rewrite?
Relationships & Community
- Which relationships help you feel most like yourself?
- How do you show care for others, and how do you prefer to receive it?
- What kind of presence do you want to be in other people’s lives?
- Who do you feel most honest around?
- How do you respond to conflict or distance?
- What kind of community are you seeking or building?
- How do you show up when someone needs you?
Step 3 – Make Your Goals Attainable
Great! Now you have some initial goals in mind. But are they attainable at this point?
Chances are, they are too broad. This step will take you from general goals to a step-by-step plan on making them specific and measurable. For each of your goals, refine them by going through the steps below.
- Is your goal specific enough? Why or why not?
- What makes your goal too broad at the moment? Why does it feel unrealistic?
- What mistakes did you make in this area the year before, and how will you improve it?
- Another way of thinking about this is: what habits do you currently have? What are you currently doing that is keeping you from your goals?
- Who are you doing it for? And why are you doing it for this person?
- It may be for yourself, it may be for someone else.
- Learning from your mistakes, how will this goal help you redefine from your mistakes?
- How will you achieve your goals?
- An open-ended question. For example, if you want to be healthier, you will walk on the treadmill every day for 5 minutes a day.
- How will you measure your progress?
- Progress has to be visible! Some ways you can measure your progress are by giving yourself a timeframe, what you will do by hour/day/week/month, a fitness watch, or some tracking app, etc.
Step 4 – Make Your List of Resolutions
You’ve answered all the supporting questions, way to go! Now you can write specific, attainable goals and stick them in your bedroom!
For the format of your resolutions, include the goal, how you will achieve it, and how you will measure your progress. Here is an example:
“I want to be healthy enough to run a 5K in 30 minutes. To achieve this goal, I will walk 30 minutes on the treadmill, four times a week, sometime between 5–8pm. I will also eat 300 calories of fruits every day to have a healthy diet to support this goal. To measure my progress, I will run a 5K at the end of each month and time myself to see if I am getting closer to the 30-minute mark.”
Step 5 – The Very Last Step: How Will You Know You Have Failed?
It’s important to be realistic, success isn’t a linear path. We are bound to encounter failure, but it’s important how you treat it.
Failure isn’t your sign to give up, it is your sign to keep trying, to keep learning, and changing.
Goals are not static, they must develop with you. It’s okay if your goals and aspirations change, or they are just unattainable at the point of life you are in. In these cases, it’s important to change your goals so you can still make them happen.
This is a conceptual step, just to prime yourself and know failure is okay as long as you keep going.
Broad question: How do you know if you encounter failure with your goal? If you have failed, what will you change?
You’re not meant to know the answer to this question until you have tried, but maybe thinking ahead can help you stop a failure from happening!
Conclusion
I’m going to be honest, this is the first time I am trying this style of writing resolutions myself. But I am hopeful I will achieve all my goals next year and become the best version of myself I can be. I wanted to share this post with you guys so we can help each other.
Check back in a year to this blog post, and we can see if we reached our goals together!
If you think this guide was helpful, please share it with your friends!
Cheers to the new year!