How to Make 2026 the Best Year: 6 Questions to Ask Yourself

December 15, 2025

AI Summary

5 min read

🎙️ The Voices & The Context

The Format: Mel Robbins delivers a solo motivational guide through an interactive year-end planning ritual, blending personal storytelling with research-backed prompts to reflect on the past year and blueprint the next, fostering an empowering and optimistic tone.
The Format: This is a guided self-reflection podcast episode structured like a live coaching session.
The Key Players:
- Mel Robbins: Bestselling author of The Let Them Theory, top podcaster, and motivational speaker sharing her 22-year family ritual for personal growth, while revealing intimate lows, highs, and a major new business launch.

🗝️ Key Themes & Topics

Mel Robbins leads listeners through a transformative year-end ritual using six research-backed questions to extract clarity from 2024's chaos and design 2025 as the "best year ever." Topics emphasize reflection before goal-setting, intrinsic motivation, and simple systems for change.

Topic 1: Looking Back (Lows, Highs, Lessons): Scroll photos/calendars to identify low points like exhaustion or loneliness, highs like family bonding, and lessons such as needing routines—backed by studies showing processing negatives reduces stress and connects you to your future self (e.g., UC Irvine/Penn State research on emotional processing).
**Topic 2: Strategic Forward Planning (Stop, Start, C

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Episode Introduction: Year-End Ritual Overview**
2 (02:22) **Why Look Back Before Looking Forward**
3 (12:40) **Research on Future Self Connection**
4 (14:24) **Question 1: What Were the Low Points of Your Year?**
5 (23:43) **Question 2: What Were the High Points/Highlights?**
6 (44:08) **Question 3: What Did You Learn About Yourself?**
7 (56:47) **Question 4: What Will You Stop Doing? (Stop Framework)**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Do you want to make 2026 your best year yet?

An amazing year doesn’t happen by chance. It happens by choice. And there are only 6 questions to ask yourself for instant clarity and insight. Your answers will show you what the very next steps are in your life.

The brand new companion workbook to this episode can be found at melrobbins.com/bestyear.

In this episode, Mel walks you through her empowering, research-backed, year-end ritual designed to set you up for success. By the end, you’ll know exactly where to steer your energy to make next year your best yet.

She will cover:

-The powerful year-end ritual she has used for the past 22 years

-The simple question to ask yourself to know what you really want

-Why doing this every single year is the key to her own success - and how if you've done this process in the past, you can take it up a notch this year

-How to use your camera roll to highlight your year

-The one best step you should take after listening to this episode

-Her own reflections on the year and the goals she is setting.

This episode comes with a 20-page companion workbook. This brand new workbook is designed to help you get clear about what you want and empower you to take the next step forward in your life.

And the cool part? It takes less than a minute for you to get your hands on it.

Just sign up at melrobbins.com/bestyear.

To learn more about Pure Genius, which Mel mentioned in today’s episode, click here to get on the waitlist.

For more resources related to today’s episode, click here for the podcast episode page.

If you liked the episode, check out this one next: How to Reinvent Your Life Starting Today

Connect with Mel: