In 2025, were your days filled with purpose, joy, and excitement, or did you simply go through the motions? Our prime years are precious and we are in them right now. How will you spend that time in 2026, will it be another year of merely existing, or do you want to start truly living?

As I sit here, writing this at 32-years-old, I do get that strong feeling that I am at a critical juncture in my life. There’s something about your 30s that makes you realise that you’re running out of second chances. That most of the doors in your life are already behind you. A moment that forces reflection on missed opportunities. It’s a mental stumble – the decade where “if only I had…” starts to surface.

“Let me ‘just check’ my email before I get back to drafting this report,” you tell yourself, jumping from your Google Doc to your inbox. Task switching might seem harmless, it might even feel productive. But beware. It can feel like you’re moving faster, but every switch has a hidden cognitive cost. This switching is quietly killing your productivity and undermining the quality of your output. The better, alternative approach? Deep focus blocks.

A huge part of any culture - whether a nation, an organisation, a family or you - is what it values. So, as we approach the end of 2025 and you start to think about goals, resolutions and plans for the new year, I encourage you to step back and ask a different question: what type of person do I want to be in 2026?

Do you struggle with low energy in the morning and throughout the day, or perhaps find that you lie awake at night feeling “tired but wired”? This is a strong signal that your cortisol rhythm could be dysregulated. Here are five ways you can boost your energy by working with your cortisol.

It’s more dangerous when we don’t know who we are. When we aren’t able to sort through the noise of opinion and focus on our own personality traits, we end up in trouble. We end up blowing in the wind of other people’s lives.