220. Before You Set Goals, Do This: My #1 Year-End Journal Ritual
220. Before You Set Goals, Do This: My #1 Year-End Journal Ritual
How a Simple Monthly Journal Practice Helped Me Build the Life I Once Dreamed About
It’s the end of the year—goal-setting season, vision board season, fresh planner season. But before you jump into resolutions and 2026 intentions, there’s something I want you to do first.
Reflect.
I’m talking about one of the most powerful journaling rituals I’ve ever used. I started it in 2020 during one of the hardest seasons of my life—when I was anxious, binge eating daily, stuck in a job that drained me, and feeling like I was never going to make it out of survival mode.
Fast forward to today: I’m happily married, building a dream business, full of energy, and feeling more aligned and peaceful than ever.
Here’s what changed everything:
At the end of every month, I wrote down my top 3 lessons. That’s it. But then I took it further.
I brainstormed practical ways to embody those lessons.
I reviewed them regularly—quarterly and at the end of the year.
I used them to shape my goals for the next season of life.
This practice helped me stay rooted in wisdom, not perfection. It reminded me of who I was becoming. It helped me build self-trust—the most underrated success metric of all.
In this episode, I walk you through exactly how to use this ritual yourself, including how to:
Revisit old versions of you to recover forgotten magic
Track your top lessons year after year
Build embodied goals (not just SMART goals)
Use momentum wisely—without slipping into all-or-nothing spirals
You’ll also hear my top 4 lessons from 2025—spanning self-trust, energetic sovereignty, erotic consistency, and the power of emotional weather—and how I’m embodying them in 2026.
If you want a journal ritual that transforms your identity while making your future self proud, this is it.
Embodied Activation
Here’s your activation for this episode:
Create Your Year-End Embodiment Map
Flip through your journals, planners, or notes from the past year. Write down 3–5 core lessons you lived in 2025.
For each one, ask:
What’s the practical embodiment of this in 2026?
How do I want to FEEL when I’m living this out?
What’s the micro-habit or energetic scaffolding that supports this?
Write a love letter to your 2025 self, thanking her for what she learned and how it made this next chapter possible.
Optional: Pick one lesson from a past year (2021 Kayla says hi!) and find a way to bring that version of you back into the mix for 2026. Which magic still applies?
Transcript
Hello, and welcome back to our final episode of 2025. I hope you've had an amazing holiday season. Personally, I've taken a few weeks off. I was actually in Costa Rica for a dance alchemy retreat, which was absolutely amazing. So I've missed getting on the mic to deliver these weekly solo episodes, and I have some absolute bangers for you.
Plan for the next few weeks. So today I'm sharing one of my top two favorite journal practices of all time. I started this in 2020, and this was during a time where I was depressed, anxious, binge eating almost every night, sometimes throughout the day, in the wrong relationship on the edge of burnout with my current job.
Living paycheck to paycheck to where I am now, which is literally so happy. So in love with life, married to the best man ever, energy for days, and I also went from one very unexpected dream job back in 2021 to now building my dream business full time. And I can attribute so much of this to this one journal practice.
So in this episode, I am sharing the journal practice that will help you quantum leap in 2026 and beyond, and this is true whether your goals are health related, business related, or something else altogether. I'm also gonna share how to do a powerhouse year end review that sets you up to level up in the coming year.
And how to use this review to create next level goals that will absolutely destroy traditional smart goals. Actually, that's gonna be next week's episode, so stay tuned. This is part one. And then I'm going to share a behind the scenes look at what this journaling has looked like for me this year and how it's helped me expand this year and how I'm also going to use it to expand in the coming year so you can see exactly what this looks like.
So this episode was inspired by an old year end favorite episode 151, where I share how a year end review can help you slay and thrive. This was back when the show was still called The Slay and Thrive Podcast, so I'll link that episode for anyone who wants to do some time traveling. Now, I personally got some chills when I revisited this episode because here is something I said.
I was massively on the struggle bus at the tail end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, and that dark night of the soul was the catalyst for a lot of epiphanies, a lot of growth, and a lot of transformation. Now I can honestly say this is the happiest, healthiest, and most peaceful I've ever been. There is still definitely work to do, but I have to also remember that the life and health and identity I have now is the one that 2017 Kayla was dreaming about.
Again, I wrote that back in 2023. In that year, that version of me was living the life that 2017 me dreamed about, and now 2025. I am living the life that 2021 Kayla was manifesting. And it blows my mind to realize how many things I once wrote down that I thought were impossible, and now they're just my Tuesday.
So if you've ever doubted that journaling works, that reflection matters or that healing creates momentum, this episode is your invitation to believe again. Okay. Let's talk about what this journal practice is and how it accelerates your capacity for growth and transformation. So this is a simple practice.
You could finish it in 10 minutes or less, or maybe you wanna take 30, 45 even an hour and make it a whole cacao ceremony and just stretch it out into this luxurious ritual. Both are beautiful. Both are effective. You get to choose your own adventure. The journal process is this, at the end of every month, you write down your top three lessons.
That's it. That's the entire practice. And I know we're only five minutes in. This is deceptively simple, but here's how you turn these monthly journal sessions into the catalyst for catalyst for wild identity upgrades. Number one, you do wanna write down the lesson. This is so important, but here's the thing.
Lessons and epiphanies often run the risk of staying in our head. That light bulb, aha moment, that never goes anywhere. It's just this thought you had one time. At worst, you forget about it at best. Maybe you remember it, but you struggle to embody it on a consistent basis. So number two, you wanna brainstorm practical ways you can embody this lesson and put it into action.
Creating ways to turn lessons into intentional action and embodied change is how you actually make real sustained shifts. One of my favorite quotes of all time is that you can't think your way into a new way of acting. You have to act your way into a new way of thinking.
And then the third part of this is to revisit the lessons you've learned throughout the year. You could do this quarterly every six months, where you go back and you look at lessons from prior. And you ask yourself, am I still embodying this wisdom? If not, don't beat yourself up, but then recalibrate and try to find ways you can bring that wisdom back into your embodied experience.
And then number four, at the end of the year, pick out your top three to four lessons from the entire year, and then you're gonna build an embodied intentional action plan around those lessons for the coming year. This year end process is how you quantum leap from one year to the next. When I look back at how much everything has changed between 2020 and now, there's part of me that is still in awe, and I want this magic to make its way into your life as well.
And you absolutely have the power through your own self witnessing and your own self-reflection, and that's super exciting. All right, and then number five, as a bonus, if you've been doing this for as long as I have, you can even go back to previous years and look at old lessons to see what wisdom the old versions of you still have that are relevant.
That's something I'm doing this year, and I'm super excited about it. Now, you can do this in a regular journal. If you do, I would recommend setting aside some pages in the journal, maybe in the back just for the lessons so you can keep them all together in one place. Or you could also do what I've done is either have a for the words file with all of the lessons in one place.
Or I have also used Passion Planners, which has this top three lesson question built right into its monthly review pages at the back of every single month. So this is my first year since 2021 that I'm investing in a passion planner again, and I'm. So excited about it, so reinvesting in a passion planner. Has actually had me going back to my old planners from prior years.
Especially 2021 Kayla Planner. So one of my male archetypes Haven refers to 2021 Kayla as his favorite historical figure, which is like wildly adorable. Also, he doesn't know a lot of his historical figures yet. Don't judge him, but I also kind of get it because she was. Very driven, very optimistic. She was joyful and she just had this like special magic around her.
And then life happened. Her biggest dream got delayed with good reason, but still delayed. And then she found herself in environments where her energy and her optimism and her belief in magic. Weren't always welcomed. In fact, those things often had her getting mocked or frowned upon. So while I resuscitate 2021, Kayla's old dreams and visions, I'm also resuscitating some of her best virtues and practices.
This is why it can be so powerful to keep old planners or journals with old lessons in them because your past selves have a lot of magic, a lot of wisdom, and you can go mine it even years later. And I actually did an episode on my top 10, 20, 21 lessons way back when. I think that was episode 53 or something like that.
So I'll link that one in the description as well. In case you're wondering why Haven is so obsessed with the 2021 version of me, she was kind of cool. Anyways, now what I'm gonna do is share with you my top four lessons from 2025. And then I'm gonna share not just what the lessons were, but how I plan to use them as a guide to make 2026 even better.
And this is really to serve as an inspiration to you so you can see what this looks like. And also I believe these lessons have universal value. So maybe one of these hits home really hard for you and you want to start to prioritize embodying this wisdom in the coming year as well. Okay. Lesson number one.
Self trust is the ultimate KPI. And this one was everything. If I just had one top one, it would be this, because I honestly think this is what people want more than anything else. They think they want the weight loss or the body transformation goal, but I think what they actually want is to prove to themself that they can build the self-trust to get to that place.
It's not about the numbers, it's about who they wanna become. And in regards to business success, creative success, whether that's in the form of clients, money, followers, downloads, book sales, all those other KPIs, we want those things because then we've using external metrics to prove we can trust ourselves, that we can trust that our message matters.
We can trust that it resonates that it lands because other people have approved of it. But this was the year I was like, the metrics might be indicators of self-trust sometimes, not always, but they are not the goal. The goal is self trust. Because self-trust is what keeps your nervous system regulated and stable, and this is everything, whether you have a health goal, business goal, or anything else in between.
This is what lets you say, I know who I am, I know what I value, and I trust what I'm building, regardless of whether or not people clap for it. And the wild paradox. Is that when you stop grasping for the external and you root so deeply in your own inner compass and sense of self trust, the external actually shifts faster.
But by then you're too grounded and rooted in your own damn self to care, or at least to care too much. And also, let's be honest, your relationship with yourself. Is your most important relationship. And yes, this is true even if you are married to the cutest, most amazing golden retriever of a husband who also happens to be a redhead because that's like triple bonus points.
So sorry, not sorry. I win. And still the relationship with self is most important. So this is the year that I learned that this relationship with self. Which all comes down to self-trust is the core metric. This is the true north and everything else just gets to be bonus points. And how I'm embodying this is I am returning to a practice I used to do religiously back in 2021 and 2020 back when I had my passion planners.
And this is tracking eight sacred habits. So these are the energetic scaffolding that helps me with my mental health, emotional health, physical health, and spiritual health. They're what make everything else easier and better in my life, regardless of what my other goals are. And I'm gonna track these goals in my planner, and this is how I build trust by looking at how often I'm keeping these eight promises to myself.
So that's number one, self-trust, ultimate KPI. Lesson number two, your internal weather matters so much more than the external. And this one is related to lesson one, but I wanna take it deeper because while I was building out the course portal for Food Freedom Fantasy. I returned to this idea of creating our own weather, and when I say that, I'm talking about creating our own emotional states instead of reacting to life circumstances and letting that be the reason we feel a certain way.
So I was building this in November, and I'm gonna be honest, November was rough. I was angry, sad, discouraged, stressed, all the things. And it was going back to my old practices and habits around creating my own weather that I realized, oh my goodness, for basically all of November, I was allowing the external circumstances to dictate my mood, and that was a choice, and I get to choose differently at any moment.
Now, this is a two step process because you don't want to bypass the original emotions of anger, of sadness, stress. Every emotion is valuable and it has data for you. It's a opportunity to grow, to take different action and to also build your capacity to feel every single emotion. So feeling the feelings is important.
And then once you've felt the feelings and let them flow, whether that's through journaling, through movement, through breath, you don't have to stay there. I really remembered our own power to create our own state on purpose, and we do this through intentional action, through the body and then also through mindset work.
Though I've learned that mindset work is not enough on its own, which is why there's so many embodiment practices inside my current offers. This one lesson. Took me from angry, stressed in a negative spiral for all of November to having the most joyful present alive and turned on December ever. And this was a choice.
It was a worth work ethic, and this is powerful AF because then the external world starts to shift right along with you because you become an energetic match for different circumstances. Or you're just starting to scan for the things that bring you peace and joy and happiness, and then your brain is automatically gonna notice more of that and less of the things that make you feel like garbage.
And the embodiment for this is doubling down on my old emotion coaching habits. So feeling the feelings first, and then also getting clear on how I want to feel, and then brainstorming ways to generate those emotions. And this could be dancing to certain songs, taking certain actions. It could be another somatic practice.
And then another thing I am doing at the end of this year is rereading the desire map and doing the work shopping for this year so I can get clear on my core desired feelings. That was lesson two, internal weather, way more important than the external weather. And lesson number three, momentum is either a secret weapon or it's kryptonite.
So handle this with care and intention. This lesson was massive for me. So I think this is universally valuable for anyone, and I also noticed this was especially valuable for me with someone who has a ton of Taurus in their birth chart. And this is true whether you're looking from a Western lens or a true Arial lens.
This year I started working more closely with true Arial astrology. A lot of it just resonated a lot more. And I have a giant pile of inner planets, moon, Jupiter, mercury, and Venus, all in Taurus. So that is a lot of fixed earth energy. And fixed Earth is about as solid and as stubborn as you can get. So if you're a fellow astrology, girly, and you have a lot of Taurus in your chart, a lot of earth in your chart, a lot of fixed sign energy in your chart, this is going to be extra valuable because when momentum is on your side, you start to become almost unstoppable.
Consistency starts to feel effortless. You're in this magical flow state where there's this ease and energy and power. But if you lose that momentum and get into more of a negative momentum spiral, say that you skip your key habits for more than three days and you start overindulging or mindlessly scrolling again, now it becomes more challenging than ever.
To pull yourself back into positive momentum, it is so much easier to keep going than it is to keep stopping and starting. And what this is gonna look like in practice for me so that it doesn't become perfectionism, is embracing this idea of energetic minimums.
And it's this idea of TMX goals. So T is the target. M is the minimum, and X is like the extreme version of the habit. And this is really important when you wanna keep the momentum going. For example, one of the things I am committed to prioritizing this year is yoga, especially yin yoga. And there's a host of reasons why I've chosen this one, and I want to do it every single day.
And my target would be a 30 to 40 minute yin yoga practice. Extreme is, you know, 60 to 90 minutes, which I almost never do, but you know, it does happen every now and then. However, what about on those worst days where I just don't feel like setting my mat out? Then I will do a 10 minute practice. And honestly it's usually not a yin practice 'cause most yin practices are longer.
I've actually been really loving, run better with Ash. He's got a lot of really great stretches for runners and they're generally 10 to 20 minutes. So that's my minimum. If I do not feel like doing 30 to 40 minutes, I can do 10 minutes. And that is how you keep the momentum going, even on the days when you really don't feel like it.
And then I also know that if I do have an off day where I skip my habits, where I overindulge, whatever it might be, then I prioritize rebuilding that momentum quickly and energetically. And I do this using my own signature process I've created called Erotic Momentum, and this helps me ensure that I win the day after Perfect.
As John Acuff would say. And again, I can track this momentum in my planner, and when I have it, I celebrate it, I safeguard it, and I protect it harder than a mother protects her cubs, a mother lion. Okay, number four, this is the last lesson. The self-help industry has been lying to you the entire time, and this is the biggest myth that is keeping you stuck.
And it's this idea that discipline and structure are toxic, masculine, or have to feel like punishment. You can make consistency feel like foreplay, and it changes everything. This year was the biggest year of growth and transformation for me, not just. Physically, but with business, with visibility, with basically every goal that I had on my vision board, and the wildest part was that this didn't come from buckling down and trying harder.
This actually came from being unavailable to keep suffering. This was really the year I cracked the code on how to infuse play and pleasure and even a splash of magic into the journey. And these things weren't nice bonuses. These were literally the path that got me everything I wanted and then some. So how am I embodying this?
Because along with lesson number one, this one is massive. I'm gonna be using my own Food Freedom Fantasy Framework to continue enjoying the journey, not just as I continue taking my health and my fitness to the next level, but also to enjoy the process of building a business and a community because I have all the tools, I have the framework, and I know how to do it.
And now the important part is to prioritize this first, instead of getting so wrapped up in things like launching and lead generation and content creation, all those business things, to the point that I forget the importance of infusing this pleasure, this play into the journey. So those were my key lessons.
The ones I'm committed to embodying in 2026 and beyond. And these are also the key pieces of this year's offers. So whether this is my signature group program, food Freedom Fantasy, get Ready, we're launching again in February, or my brand new one-on-one immersion. Consistency is foreplay. This is where we go deep.
This is where your big goals. Are going to meet your nervous system, your unique wiring, and your sacred yes. The one that's built on what turned you on, what lights you up, and what makes you feel good. Because what makes you feel good is gonna be very different than what makes someone else feel good. And we want this to be tailored to you.
So I haven't talked about consistency as foreplay yet, but this is for the woman who wants it all. So the private support, the personalized strategy, the identity upgrades you get the entire Food Freedom Fantasy portal, including any live rounds that come up. You get the sisterhood, you get dance alchemy, rituals, and out of all of this, you are going to create the version of you who's done treating your cravings.
Your chaos and your wiring like it's some kind of problem to be solved and is now ready to treat it like a treasure map to not only achieving all your dreams, but feeling so good while doing it. So if you're a little foreplay curious or full on ready to be ravished by structure, you can book your call to Adventure through the link in the show notes.
I really wanna help you make 2026 the year you stop chasing goals and start becoming the woman who lives them. And I have so many amazing episodes coming for you in the future on these exact topics. So stay tuned for those. And in the meantime, I am wishing you the most amazing rest of 2025 and an incredible 2026 and beyond.
Take care.
