Episode 17: The End-of-Year Emotional Audit

Description: Tina invites you into a gentle end-of-year emotional audit to close out 2025 with intention, softness, and care. You’ll pause, breathe, and reflect on what surprised you, what strengthened you, what you want to carry forward, and your best hope for your January self in 2026. Think of it as a simple ritual to bring your heart, mind, and nervous system a little closer together before the new year begins.

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Transcription: Hi, and welcome to Self-Care for Educators. I am your host, Dr. Tina Boogren and I can't believe I'm about to say this, but this is episode 17 of this season, which means that it is the final episode of 2025, which is crazy. So, oh my goodness, this episode is going to come out on December 21st, and we're gonna take a little break. I want to give Adrienne a break. I want to take a little break. I want to give you a break. I want you to sink into your break. So we are not going to release an episode on December 28th, but we will be back and we will kick off 2026 together on January 4th of 2026, which means that this episode is the final episode for 2025.

So that brings us to my invitation for you for this week. So this week what we're going to do is we are going to close out December and really all of 2025 with something I'm going call a very gentle practice, and it is going to be the end of the year emotional audit. So I want you to think of this as, oh, the equivalent of taking a deep breath, a pause. I want this to feel like a ritual that's going to bring your heart and your mind and your nervous system all a little bit closer together. So if you're listening to this during your commute, or maybe you're out walking the dog or you're sitting down for the first time today, or it's morning, I hope this feels really good.

So as we did last week and we've been doing, I've been trying to do more and more. Let's just pause and take, take a nice deep breath together. Iin through your nose and out your mouth, if you can. Go ahead and check in. If your shoulders are, you're wearing 'em up like earrings, see if you can drop them about an inch and see if you can just slow down and kind of put the brakes on the rushing. We're not here to rush. We're not here to really fix anything. We're just gong to do some noticing and some reflecting together.

So this emotional audit is really just a moment of reflection where I want you to just pause and do a little, perhaps journaling or just thinking about the following questions. So think about this very first one. What surprised me this year? What surprised me this year? So maybe that's a person or a student or a challenge or a joy that you didn't see coming. Maybe it was something small like, this was the year that you realized how much you love slow coffee in the morning. Or maybe it's something big. You had a big career shift, or you set a new boundary, or ah, you let part of yourself kind of soften in different ways this year. So surprises often reveal what matters most to us. 

So take a minute and I want you to think about what surprised you this year. If you have a notebook close by or your journal, just maybe make a note of that. Come back and you can revisit this more, but what's your first instinct when I ask you that question? What surprised you this year? 

Next question, what strengthened you this year? What strengthened you this year? So this doesn't have to be something huge and heroic. Maybe, maybe you learned how to ask for help, which is one of the hardest, bravest things you can do. Maybe you showed up for someone else when you were tired. Maybe you kept going. Maybe you stopped going, you rested, you healed. Remember, strength sometimes looks like endurance, but sometimes it looks like surrender, and sometimes it looks like joy. So pause and think about what strengthened you this year. 

Prompt three, what do you want to carry forward? What do you want to carry forward into the new year? So this is where that intentionality meets hope, which is such a beautiful intersection. You might not be a resolution person, so don't think of it that way. It doesn't have to be a giant overhaul. I want you to just see if you can identify one thing. So maybe it's a feeling, maybe it's a practice, maybe it's a truth that served you well in 2025, and so that deserves to stay with you into 2026. So maybe it's the way you started checking in with yourself. Maybe it's a boundary again that you finally held. Maybe it's rest. Maybe, it's a spark of confidence that you allowed yourself to think, wow, I can do this. So I want you to think about that, maybe make a little note if you can, what's something you wanna carry forward into 2026?

And then I want you to think about maybe, maybe you picture your future January self as you are listening to this, the week of, coming out Sunday. December 21st, as you move into the week of December 22nd, I want you to pause and picture, whew, who is it that's going to step into the new year? And what I mean is , what is your best hope for your January self?

What if you can look ahead to next month, which kind of sets the tone for next year, like what is your best possible self? What does January look like for you, and can you get a real clear vision of that now so that you have that to kind of hold up and work towards and think about in January as you move into the new year.

You know, January, and we'll talk about this more in January. I think January is really hard, and we sometimes forget that because right now we're in the midst of getting ourselves through December, right? We're just clawing our way to that finish line, like just getting to winter break. And then we take that break and we come back to school and then it's like, oof. There's the letdown from the holidays. Oh, we got to pack everything up again. All those holiday decorations, right? Then there's all these expectations in the news of, oh, these big diet plans and pressure and resolutions, and the reality is it's cold, for many of us, it's dark and it's just, it can be a really, really tough month.

So what if you think of head and you go, okay, year after year after year, January's notoriously tough. We know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. How can we make that look different? And I love to start that by thinking about how when you picture your best possible self, what does she or he look like?

Can you write that description so that you even know what you're looking for when you think about your best possible future self? Maybe you even think all the way through 2026, but at least starting in January, can you get a vision and a picture of that? Because that, that month is gonna set the tone for the whole rest of 2026.

So let me go back through those questions again. And again, you don't have to do all of them. Do the ones that work for you, come up with your own questions. But here's the questions that I'm offering up. What surprised me this year? What strengthened me this year? What do I want to carry forward? And then that optional- think about your best possible future self, your January self or your 2026 self. And just spend a little time thinking about it, talking about it with someone else reflecting on it. For me, I'm going to do journaling around this. I love to kind of do this audit at the end of the year, and I love the idea of doing an emotional audit.

Yes, we can do a ta-da list and we can do celebrations. Please do all those things. But I love the idea of doing this emotional audit. And so I hope this works for you. I hope you have the most amazing break. I hope you take time that's just for you, and that you spend time really praising yourself, celebrating your accomplishments, and giving yourself the gift of truly resting.

Please as always, feel my hand on your back as you do this, and know how incredibly grateful I am for you. I can't wait to kick off 2026 with all of you. I've got some exciting updates for some kind of pivots that I'm thinking about making in 2026, and you're the group that I want to share this with first, so stay tuned for that.

Thank you to Adrienne. Thank you for all of the work that you do all the time to get this out to our people. Thank you to Marzano Resources and Solution Tree and to you this badass self-care squad. So incredibly grateful for you, so proud of you, surviving 2025 and getting yourself on solid ground as we start to look ahead to 2026.

But don't miss this. Don't miss this. Don't get too far ahead of yourself. Take time to really pause and reflect and rest. You deserve it. I love you so much. I'm cheering so hard for you. Make it a great week. Make it a great two weeks, and we will see you back here on January 4th. 

If this episode resonated with you, find more emotional wellness episodes here.