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The first week of January is here, and along with it, the pressure to transform ourselves overnight. Don’t get me wrong, I love planning and an opportunity for reinvention, but it always feels unrealistic to demand an instant glow-up when most of us are simply trying to make it through the post-Christmas slump with our sanity still intact.
A lot can change in a year: this year I’ve lived abroad, got married, and opened two London stores for my business. There have been some major highs, but also some major lows. I’ve suffered burnout, experienced the grief of losing a pregnancy, and a good deal more stress than I would’ve hoped.
So, as it is every year, January is my time to look back, notice what’s shifted and ask whether the life I’m building matches the person I’m becoming (or want to become). Over the years I’ve built it into a system I follow every single year, which I’ve personally tweaked for years to ensure it gives the right balance between making sure you have a plan, without the pressure of ‘new year, new me’, and one that’s also backed by habit theory – you know, that argument that big changes come from small actions, rather than waking up one January morning with the ache to become an entirely new person.
For more on how to make 2026 your best year yet, both personally and productively – keep scrolling. And for more game-changing hacks, don’t miss MC UK‘s guides to neuroscientist-approved productivity tips, the Mel Robbins-approved brain dump method, or edit of the best wellness journals, here.
Grace Beverley: How to Make 2026 Your Best Year Yet
Step 1: Looking back
I really don’t think you can make a good plan for the year ahead if you don’t know whether you actually stuck to your goals the year before.
So I start by asking myself a series of unglamorous questions:
- What did I achieve this year?
- What quietly mattered even if it didn’t look impressive on paper?
- Which habits supported me?
- Which habits derailed me more than I’d like to admit?
- What do I wish I had more time for?
- What repeatedly got in the way?
The purpose isn’t to hold up a magnifying glass to every half-finished goal. It’s to understand what life really looked like. Sometimes the things that went well were never on my list at all, or the hardest times were also the ones that taught me to be more compassionate with myself and reframed what I really want from both my career and wider lifestyle.
After this, I like to divide the challenges of the year into things I could control and things I absolutely could not, it helps me work out where I need to take responsibility and where I need to let myself off the hook.
Step 2: Knowing where you’re going
Until a couple of years ago, I was sceptical about manifestation. I don’t identify as ‘woo woo’, and to be honest, I used to roll my eyes, but since I’ve learnt the science behind it, my view has changed completely. I spoke to Neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart on my podcast just a few weeks ago, and she explained how when you envision your desires, your brain finds it tricky to tell the difference between what you’re visualising and what’s actually happening, so when you manifest, you’re essentially training it for the process of achieving your goals.
So after looking back, I ask myself what kind of life I want to move toward and create my own version of a vision board. I start with a brain dump on a big piece of paper. I ask myself three questions:
- Who do I want to be?
- How do I want to live?
- What do I want to do?
This stage isn’t about pretty pictures; the real benefit happens when you write out your thoughts and get clear on what you really want from your life in the next year.
I say the next year because I don’t think planning beyond two years makes sense. You never know what life is going to throw your way, and if you create an unrealistic vision board, you end up chasing a movie-style moodboard rather than a specific goal.
Step 3: How to actually set your goals
So many of us get goal-setting wrong every single year. We like to imagine sweeping promises to live differently, and then leave them in the front of our notebook to be opened 6 months later with a pang of guilt. I organise my goals into areas of life so that they touch every part of my life: health, career, relationships, personal development, finances, and mindset. I always think it forces me to see the year as something balanced, not just an extended to-do list.
Once I know what matters to me in each category, I choose 3 goals in each one and make them really specific. If a goal cannot be broken down into tangible steps, it usually means it is too abstract to be useful: a year is far too long a timeline to move toward something undefined.
Step 4: Turning goals into habits
I say this every single year, but you can set the most thoughtful and intentional goals imaginable, but your daily habits are what actually determine what you get done in a year. (If you need convincing of this, read James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits; it changed my life.) The psychological reward of goal setting is instant, but the reward of following through is slower, and that is why so many of us struggle. But the small steps you take repeatedly will always outperform the grand gestures you do once.
So, as a final step in my new year planning, I take my yearly goals, turn them into habits, and schedule them into my days. For example, if I want to prioritise strength training, what does that mean on a Wednesday morning when I am making breakfast half-awake? It helps to track them, not to punish yourself, but to show yourself evidence of your own consistency. I once drew a star chart on a whiteboard in my gym, crossing off each workout until it looked like something out of a primary school classroom (it worked).
Step 5: Actually sticking to it
I think the part people forget is that planning is an ongoing thing, not just something for the first week of January, while we’re trying to get over our collective hangxiety.
I revisit my goals each month, and sometimes I decide that something I thought I wanted no longer fits the life I want to build for myself, or won’t be possible due to something out of my control.
Consistency is so often misunderstood as doing everything without fail, but for me, it is the agreement I make with myself to keep showing up, even when the year is not going the way I imagined.
Planning is not about predicting the future or controlling every outcome; it’s about creating space to think and deciding what matters enough to prioritise.
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