Learning 2 Lead Leading 2 Learn

I’m lucky to have amazing friends who also happen to be incredible coaches. Each January, we gather to talk about the year ahead. I cherish this time and these conversations. We reflect on the highs, lows, and learnings from the past year, then set goals and intentions for what’s coming.

This work is hard, vulnerable, and raw. Despite being an experienced leadership coach myself, I still find it terrifyingly difficult to trust that I’ll find the right question or process to dig deep into what I most hope to feel, experience, and become.

Where do you even start?

This year, sitting with a blank journal page and a few reflective questions wasn’t particularly inspiring. So I stretched myself by seeking support from my GenAI coach. To be clear, I love working with human coaches—the advantage of my GenAI coach is immediate accessibility.

Six Questions That Changed Everything

Here are the prompts my GenAI coach used to guide our conversation:

1. What brought you alive?
When you look back on this past year, what moments or experiences stand out where you felt most aligned with who you are at your core—where your leadership, relationships, or choices felt most authentic and energizing?

2. What learning matters most?
As you reflect on key moments of success, productive failure, and breakthroughs from 2025, what insight do you want to keep close as a touchstone moving forward?

3. What are you ready to release?
When you think about the past year—with all its gifts and learning—what patterns, habits, beliefs, or ways of being no longer serve you?

4. What wants to be at the center?
As you imagine moving through 2026, what value or principle wants to be at the center of how you lead, live, and show up this year? What’s calling to you most strongly?

5. What’s trying to be born through you?
What are you sensing wants to emerge or be expressed in 2026 that has perhaps been waiting, gestating, or constrained until now?

6. What wants to happen first?
What feels like the most important first step—however small—that would help you begin living into these principles?

That fifth question stopped me in my tracks. It still does. “What is trying to be born through you?” That’s the hard and deeply personal work of naming what is becoming within us.

The Truth About Not Knowing

Here’s what I’ve learned: it’s OK to not know. We don’t have to have it all figured out, and we certainly might not have the full language to describe it. But I think we feel it – our truth, higher purpose, and unique gifts.

We feel it through moments of flow, resonance, love, and connection. Through the grounding, joy and warmth that so often arise in our everyday encounters. They’re woven into ordinary moments: a conversation that energizes us, work that makes us lose track of time, relationships that feel like coming home, beauty that absorbs us. Pay attention to these moments. They are quietly pointing us towards what matters most.

As humans, we often look past these gifts. It takes intention, presence, patience, and practice to notice and acknowledge them.

What I’m learning is that uncovering our purpose isn’t something we do once and check off a list. It’s a continual process of discovery and rediscovery.

My Three Guides for 2026

What will I be moving toward in 2026?

Presence: To feel what is in the moment. To discover my truth as grounding presence. To witness, feel, savour, and work through the beauty and messiness of life. To release control and embrace possibility.

Courage: An edge to grow into. To be guided by the voice of love rather than the voice of fear. To name and move toward what is most important. To embrace self-compassion over self-criticism and stretch beyond my self-imposed limitations. To accept that this work is imperfect and takes practice.

Connection: To embrace the importance of connection to nature, self, Spirit, family, friends, and creativity. To create and nurture conditions for transformation, joy, and deep relationality.

Your Turn

I’m curious: What are you sensing wants to emerge in 2026? What’s trying to be born through you?

You don’t need to have all the answers. Maybe start by noticing what brings you alive, what feels most authentic, what calls to you. The language will come. The clarity will unfold.

If you’d like, use the six questions above as a starting point for your own reflection. And if you’re willing, I’d love to hear what you discover.

Here’s to a year of becoming.