The Pause Before the Leap
The end of the year is near. The holiday lights are twinkling at my neighborhood hardware store, and I can feel the collective hum of people gearing up for what’s next — goals, resolutions, vision boards, new beginnings.
But before we leap forward, I invite you to pause. How you end this year will shape how you begin the next. Before you set a single goal, take an honest, embodied look at the ones you didn’t reach. The dreams that didn’t unfold. The projects that stalled. The relationships or outcomes that didn’t go as you’d hoped.
Can you grieve the gap between what you wanted and what actually happened?
The Body Knows
Last week, I was coaching a new client — a high-achieving executive who’s led companies he truly believed in. On paper, his career looked enviable. But he’d also weathered a few endings that hadn’t gone the way he planned.
Now, a few months into his job search, he was restless and awake most nights, replaying what he called the “failures” of his past. When I asked if he’d allowed himself to feel the loss or anger from those endings, he stared at me blankly. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Each time, I just moved on to the next venture.”
That’s the illusion of staying above the line — thinking we’re over something because our mind has moved on, while the body still holds the story.
Our middle-of-the-night minds are brilliant truth-tellers. They reveal where we’re still in resistance, where something remains incomplete. The sleeplessness was his body’s way of telling him: something is still unfinished.
The truth is — we can’t create what’s next while we’re still gripping what’s gone. Completion requires more than reflection. It requires sensation. We must let the body feel, release, and metabolize what it’s been carrying.
My own lessons through Grief
This isn’t just theory for me.
A few years ago, I came to the end of a vision I’d held for over a decade. My husband and I were on our final round of IVF after ten years of trying to have a child. I had built an entire identity around that dream. I pictured myself as a mom, imagined my future raising children, and creating a family. When the test came back negative, it felt like my life ended. I couldn’t get out of bed for days. My body ached. My chest felt hollow. Fears came in waves that made no logical sense — just raw, uncontrollable release.
I couldn’t imagine a future that didn’t include children. The acute grief lasted for months, but as the time passed, something shifted. The fog lifted, little by little. I started to feel tiny sparks of possibility, like sunlight cracking through the clouds. Eventually, there were weeks on end that I didn’t feel the fog of grief. I was able to talk about not having children without being sent into a spiral of shame and loss.
Now six years later, I live a life I couldn’t have pictured when I was in the grip of the grief – a life full of creativity, intimacy, joy, and meaning. There are still moments of grief about not having my own children, but they don’t consume me. I can feel it, honor it, and let it pass.
It was not easy to sit in the pain of this loss, but I believe fully feeling it was essential. Only by letting the old dream die could I make space for what wanted to live through me next. This experience taught me that even when life doesn’t go the way we planned, we still have the power to choose how we meet it. I could keep fighting my grief, or I could surrender to the deeper intelligence of my emotions, trusting it to reveal what’s next.
A Year-End Practice for Completion
Before you move into 2026, take some time to close the energetic loop on this year.
- Name What Didn’t Happen.
Revisit your journal or vision board. Write out the goals you didn’t meet. Be honest. Be specific.
- Teach the Class.
Imagine you’re teaching others how not to get the results you wanted. What patterns, beliefs, or avoidance strategies can you now see with compassion?
- Take 100% Responsibility.
Using the Conscious Leadership framework, notice what lifelong patterns or payoffs might have been at play. What was the gift or lesson of this not happening?
- Feel It Fully.
Use the Emotional Intelligence Practice to let the energy move through. Cry, shake, rage, breathe — let the body speak.
- Ritualize the Release.
Choose an image, song, or object that represents the unrealized dream. Express your gratitude, your anger, your goodbye. Move your body. Let music carry what words can’t.
The Courage to Feel Is Often the Path to Freedom
It’s unfamiliar and often uncomfortable, this slowing down. But grief — when met with breath and curiosity — always clears the way for creation. My client is beginning this work now — not fixing, not rushing — just feeling. And already, his system is opening to the next chapter.
As you close 2025, remember: You can’t create a conscious new year by bypassing an unconscious ending.
So I’ll leave you with this question:
What vision do you need to release so that the next one can find you?
